Building ambitious software — Jonathan Kelley, Dioxus Labs & Cognition
Summary
Jonathan Kelley discusses building ambitious, cross-platform software using Rust (Dioxus), detailing the challenges of maintaining high quality across a complex stack. He highlights how AI coding agents have dramatically accelerated development—allowing the team to implement features like deeply integrated Kotlin and Swift plugins in weeks—but notes that this shift changes the focus from writing code to maintaining architectural quality. The core message is that while code is now cheap, architectural integrity and quality remain the primary concerns for ambitious projects.
Key takeaways
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The Shift in Software Engineering Focus
17:12
With AI agents handling the low-level development burden (e.g., fighting the borrow checker), the job of a software engineer shifts from writing code to architecting elegant solutions and thinking about system evolution.
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Code Quality vs. Code Quantity
17:12
The speaker asserts that 'code is cheap now, but quality is not.' Maintaining a high quality bar across the entire codebase is critical for developer experience and business stability.
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AI Agents as Knowledge Accelerators
13:20
Coding agents excel at 'knowledge problems,' such as sifting through thousands of pages of documentation, reverse engineering APIs, and recalling deep technical specifications (e.g., CSS specs), accelerating tasks that previously took years of hand-written effort.
Technical details
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Dioxus Framework
0s
A cross-platform app framework written in Rust, aiming to allow development using HTML and CSS as the markup language, supporting web, iOS, and Android apps.
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Blitz Rendering Engine
615s
A lightweight, custom web browser-grade CSS and HTML rendering engine developed for Dioxus. It is noted for its small bundle size (less than 5 MB) and low runtime memory consumption (less than 50 MB), compared to Electron apps.
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Subsecond Hot Reload
615s
A generic hot reload engine for Rust, C, and C++ that watches code for edits, recompiles changed parts, and patches the running application in place in approximately 100 milliseconds.
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Rust Development Acceleration
707s
AI agents are capable of handling the 'borrow checker' and 'edge cases' in Rust, effectively reducing the language's learning curve from a development burden into a feature.
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Build System Integration
800s
The team successfully implemented deeply integrated Kotlin and Swift plugins for Dioxus, a feature that previously required years of manual development effort, achieving it in weeks using coding agents.
Mentioned resources
Channel & topics
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