Rust keeps making me slower, and that's the point
Rust does not let me lie to it. The borrow checker stops me at the exact moment I was about to do something I hadn't thought through. Early on this felt like the language fighting me. Now I think it's the closest thing I have to a senior engineer reading over my shoulder.
It also changed how I scope work. In RLER I deferred deep reinforcement learning entirely and shipped honest tabular Q-learning first, because I'd rather have a small correct thing than a big handwavy one. Rust nudges you toward that mindset — make the states explicit, make the errors explicit, and the design follows.
I'm slower in Rust. I'm also more sure of what I shipped. I'll take that trade most days.