With access to good MCP tools, I've had really good experience using claude code to write rust: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702820

What MCP tools are you using?

Honestly, it's mostly just some random LSP adapter I forked and fixed a few bugs on, and it's not even that comprehensive but it goes a long way and seems most essential. Then I have some notes in the long term context about how to use a combination of gh CLI and cargo docs to read documentation and dependency source code/examples.

A few things beyond your question, for anyone curious:

I've also poked around with a custom MCP server that attempts to teach the LLM how to use ast-grep, but that didn't really work as hoped. It helps sometimes but my next shot on that project will be to rely on GritQL. Smaller LLMs stumble over the YAML indentation. GritQL is more like a template language for AST aware code transformations.

Lastly, there are probably a lot of little things in my long term context that help get into a successful flow. I wouldn't be surprised if a key difference between getting good results and getting bad results with these agentic LLM tools is how people are reacting to failures. If a failure makes you immediately throw up your hands and give up, you're not doing it right. If instead you press the little '#' (in claude code) and enter some instructions to the long term context memory, you'll get results. It's about persistence and really learning to understand these things as tools.