Made a Rust based AI agent

Tejas — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:48:58 +0000

I built and published a Rust AI agent from scratch in my journey to learn Rust.

GitHub: https://github.com/Tejas1Koli/rust-ai-agent
crates.io: https: https://crates.io/crates/rust-ai-agent

What it currently supports:
• Local LLM execution with Ollama
• DuckDuckGo web search
• Async execution with Tokio
• Structured logging
• Typed configuration + validation
• Cross-platform binaries (Linux/macOS/Windows)
• Single-binary CLI distribution

One thing I found interesting while building this:

The entire source code is currently around ~25 KB.

An equivalent LangChain-style AI agent would usually end up much larger because of:
framework layers → wrappers → middleware → orchestration abstractions

Rust forced me to think more directly about:
• Runtime flow
• Async execution
• Tool orchestration
• Error handling
• Deployment
• System design decisions

Compared to many Python-based AI agents, Rust gives:
• Lower runtime overhead
• Better concurrency handling
• Stronger type safety
• Easier deployment through compiled binaries
• Less dependency/runtime bloat

Building this made me realize that AI tooling is increasingly becoming a systems engineering problem, not just a prompting problem.

Still improving:
• Provider abstractions
• Streaming
• Memory/runtime systems
• Better orchestration flow

You can try it with:

cargo install rust-ai-agent

P.S. I used tutorials/documentation while building parts of this, but implementing and shipping it taught me much more than just watching content.

Rust #AI #SystemsProgramming #OpenSource #DeveloperTools #LocalAI #Tokio #Ollama

DEV Community: Tejas

Made a Rust based AI agent

Rust #AI #SystemsProgramming #OpenSource #DeveloperTools #LocalAI #Tokio #Ollama