OpenAI also hands out free subscriptions to open source maintainers: https://developers.openai.com/community/codex-for-oss They're time limited for now, but they've been pretty generous about who gets them. Anyone who can show Rust contributions would have been able to get one before.
Or in software terms, BigCorp sponsors you to develop an open source tool fulltime. If you make the tool more useful for them while making it more complex or worse or ignoring things for others, they might fund you next year as well. If you don't develop things that help them, they might stop and send that money elsewhere and you will need to get a normal job instead and drop your tool work to part-time. Even though they aren't dictating anything, what are you incentivised to do?
The only times this actually happened are C++ and CORBA as far as I remember. Both of them were bureaucratic design by committee efforts from the start, the people doing it weren't users but implementors looking to stop competition, and it all happened before the open source era.
>I’m still writing all my own code and text, because (a) that’s paramount, and (b) the project policy requires it, but I had useful LLM analysis assistance on several of the PRs mentioned in this post.
from the article
https://forge.rust-lang.org/policies/llm-usage.html#experime...
What you suggest may thus be more or less already happening.
Rust is the best language to serialize agentic LLM output to. It's native, well constructed, low-defect due to design. It's also easy for humans to read and debug if necessary.
The biggest problem with Rust is the compile times. The cycle has to get faster. And we need to start thinking about making the artifact cache non-blocking so multiple agents can work simultaneously - that'll be a big task, but essential if we want to speed up work on one machine rather than spinning up clusters of agent sandboxes (the alternative, perhaps superior solution).