Me too! A couple days ago I gave claude the JMAP spec and asked it to write a JMAP based webmail client in rust from scratch. And it did! It burned a mountain of tokens, and its got more than a few bugs. But now I've got my very own email client, powered by the stalwart email server. The rust code compiles into a 2mb wasm bundle that does everything client side. Its somehow insanely fast. Honestly, its the fastest email client I've ever used by far. Everything feels instant.
I don't need my own email client, but I have one now. So unnecessary, and yet strangely fun.
Its quite a testament to JMAP that you can feed the RFC into claude and get a janky client out. I wonder what semi-useless junk I should get it to make next? I bet it wouldn't do as good a job with IMAP, but maybe if I let it use an IMAP library someone's already made? Might be worth a try!
Claude’s toy email client gets closer to the speed limit than Gmail does. Why is Gmail so slow? I have no idea.
I asked a cursor agent to do the same for a geotiff to pmtiles converter. It managed to optimize the performance from tens of days to half a day for the case I wanted to solve.
Defect free. Immaculate types. Safe. Ergonomic. Beautiful to read.
AI is going to be writing a lot of Rust.
The final arguments of "rust is hard to write" are going to quiet down. This makes it even more accessible.
> Defect free.
I am an upstream developer on the Rust Project (lang, library, cargo, others), and obviously a big fan of Rust. This kind of advocacy doesn't help us, and in fact makes our jobs harder, because for some people this kind of advocacy is their main experience of people they assume are representative of Rust. Please take it down a notch.
I think Rust is the best available language for many kinds of problems. Not yet all, but we're always improving it to try to work for more people. It gets better over time. I'd certainly never call it, or almost any other software, "defect free".
And I'd never call it "the final language"; we're building it to last the test of time, and we hope things like the edition system mean that the successor to Rust is a future version of Rust, but things can always change, and we're not the only source of great ideas.
If you genuinely care about Rust, please adjust your advocacy of Rust to avoid hurting Rust and generating negative perceptions of Rust.
Oh my, there's a new language called Rust? Didn't they know there already is one? The old one is so popular that I can't imagine the nicely readable one to gain any traction whatsoever (even if the old one is an assault on the senses).
I honestly can't tell if this is a humorous attack or not.
Poe's law is validated once again.
Bullshit walks.
As AI makes human-readable syntax less relevant, the Erlang/Elixir BEAM virtual machine is an ideal compilation target because its "let it crash" isolated process model provides system-level fault tolerance against AI logic errors, arguably more valuable than Rust’s strict memory safety.
The native Actor Model simplifies massive concurrency by eliminating shared state and the complex thread management. BEAM's hot code swapping capability also enables a continuous deployment where an AI can dynamically rewrite and inject optimized functions directly into live applications with zero downtime.
Imagine a future where an LLM is constantly monitoring server performance, profiling execution times, and dynamically rewriting sub-optimal functions in real-time. With Rust, every optimization requires a recompile and a deployment cycle that interrupts the system.
Finally, Erlang's functional immutability makes deterministic AI reasoning easier, while its built-in clustering replaces complex external infrastructure, making it a resilient platform suited for automated iteration.
The JMAP client itself is hosted here: https://seph.au/claude-webmail/
I can't prove this but its a purely static web app. You need a jmap server to use it. If you use stalwart, set:
server.listener.http.permissive-cors = true
or server.listener.https.permissive-cors = true
Then you should be able to put https://localhost:8080/ into the URL box. It should also work with fastmail, but I haven't tested it.Live version: https://seph.au/claude-webmail/