Rust Bucket: A Rusty bucket to carry your slop

Rust-Bucket is a Rust-first project bootstrapper for AI-first engineering agentic coding workflows. It prepares an already-initialized Rust repo (you have already run git init and cargo init) by installing a standard set of tooling files, documentation, and conventions.

Rust-Bucket is designed to be:

• Cross-platform: Linux, macOS, and Windows.
• Deterministic: templates are embedded in the Rust-Bucket binary.
• Strict: agents get rigid structure and automated checks.

What it does

rust-bucket apply

Detects if this is being run for the first time by the presense of rust-bucket.toml

If the first time, sets up the current crate.

• Prompts you for a small set of decisions (interactive by default).
• Writes rust-bucket.toml into the current repo to persist those decisions.
• Generates the managed file set (docs, lint configs, testing configs, devcontainer stubs).
• Refuses to run if any managed file already exists.

If we have run this before, it updates the managed file set.

• Loads and preserves all choices from rust-bucket.toml.
• Prompts for any new questions, if necessary.
• Re-renders templates from the embedded template pack.
• Overwrites all managed files with the current template versions.
• Does not attempt to diff or dry-run in v1.

Rust-Bucket never edits a target repo’s README.md or ARCHITECTURE.md

Managed file set (v1)

The initial "managed" set is expected to include:

• AGENTS.md
• CLAUDE.md
• STYLE_GUIDE.md
• TESTING.md
• .claude/agents/*.md (coordinator, coding, judge, tidy, reflection)
• .config/nextest.toml
• deny.toml (if enabled)
• rustfmt.toml / clippy configuration (as needed)
• devcontainer stubs for Sculptor (placeholders acceptable)

Template engine (v1)

Rust-Bucket uses the Liquid template language (via cargo-generate as a library) to render embedded templates into the target repo.

No hooks in v1.

Self-hosting

Rust-Bucket is intended to be able to rust-bucket apply its own repository without special cases. See ARCHITECTURE.md.