It's basically doing the same thing that, say, `return true` might do to indicate a function succeeded, but with more explicit types. However, because it uses `Result`, it can be used with the `try`/question mark operator which can be convenient in some situations.

That said, a couple of the examples here feel a bit strange - they're clever things you can do, but they're not necessarily things you often have to do, particularly for a relatively simple task like this. I think the problem with the author's approach is that they can't distinguish between "weird because Rust is weird" and "weird because the LLM generated bad code", because they (understandably) don't have enough experience in what good Rust code looks like.

it is indeed pretty weird. clippy has a lint against this iirc. it's recommended to just create a custom error type, even if its just an empty struct or a single-variant enum

this lets you implement `std::error::Error`, which you really should to make it less painful when you want to erase the type (`std::error::Error` is `dyn`-compatible)

It's not like people regularly decide this is a good return type. Just because Claude isn't good at designing code or what have you doesn't mean rust is bad/weird.

Sure this is something someone can do but it's suggesting the caller doesn't care about why it failed and doesn't need anything from it's success. It's a choice but it's not a typical one. Maybe the fact that it looks weird and there is no comment is a clue that this isn't high quality code.

People really should be more skeptical of LLM coding. Claude is not as amazing as marketing makes it sound. It is amazing in that it can write code and follow specs sometimes, but a lot of quality gets lost along the way without close supervision by someone who knows better

Sometimes you just want a fancy boolean. The advantage is that Result has all the Result APIs and you can compose it with other Results, but otherwise this is just a success bool.

It’s the equivalent of Haskell’s Either, with Option being the equivalent of Maybe. They’re fairly well-defined idioms.

Probably on topic here - I talk like an LLM sometimes, and parse my points through them sometimes. I’d reasonably use that terminology and think nothing of it as it’s precise and correct. That said, this was partially LLM and my thinking here.

I guess I'm an LLM then. I've been referring to the structure of types as "shape" for more than a decade and so have plenty of others

No it is not. If you were introduced to the term via LLMs doesnt mean everyone was.