Beautiful Rust

A Claude Code plugin with one skill, rust-best-practices, that teaches Claude to write idiomatic, robust, maintainable Rust. Once installed, it loads automatically whenever a task involves Rust, cargo, crates, the borrow checker, clippy, or .rs files.

The guidance is distilled from five sources, with a condensed digest of each bundled in the skill so Claude can consult the original reasoning when it needs to:

• Google Rust Style Guide
• Rust API Guidelines (official rust-lang checklist)
• Effective Rust by David Drysdale
• Rust Design Patterns (idioms, patterns, anti-patterns)
• Microsoft Pragmatic Rust Guidelines

Where the sources disagree, the skill picks a side and says why.

Install in Claude Code

One step, from a terminal:

claude plugin install beautiful-rust --marketplace morganlinton/BeautifulRust

Or inside a Claude Code session:

/plugin marketplace add morganlinton/BeautifulRust
/plugin install beautiful-rust@beautiful-rust

Add --scope project to the terminal command to enable it for everyone working in the current repository (each collaborator still runs the install once).

To try it for a single session without installing:

git clone https://github.com/morganlinton/BeautifulRust
claude --plugin-dir ./BeautifulRust

The skill is namespaced under the plugin, so you can invoke it explicitly with /beautiful-rust:rust-best-practices. You rarely need to: it triggers on its own.

Install in claude.ai

claude.ai takes a zip of the skill folder, with the folder as the zip root:

cd skills && zip -r ../rust-best-practices.zip rust-best-practices -x '*.DS_Store'

Upload it under Customize > Skills (on some plans this lives under Settings). Code execution must be enabled first. Skills uploaded to claude.ai also sync down into Claude Code sessions signed in with the same account.

What the skill covers

skills/rust-best-practices/SKILL.md is about 500 lines, organized so Claude can scan it while coding:

1. Mindset: Rust-shaped code, invalid states unrepresentable, application vs library
2. Pre-handback checklist: fmt, clippy with -D warnings, test, doc; lint policy
3. Ownership and borrowing: what to do instead of cloning for the borrow checker
4. Types and API design: naming, newtypes, common traits, builders, visibility, generics vs dyn
5. Errors and panics: Option vs Result vs panic, library vs application error types
6. Everyday idioms: iterators, combinators, format!, imports, drop guards
7. Concurrency and async: Send assertions, lock discipline, async fn, yield points
8. Unsafe and FFI: when it's allowed, SAFETY: comments, soundness, bindgen
9. Crates, modules, dependencies: workspace layout, features, semver
10. Documentation and comments
11. Tests
12. Performance, in order
13. Final checklist

skills/rust-best-practices/references/ holds one digest per source for deeper lookups.

Layout

BeautifulRust/
├── .claude-plugin/
│   ├── plugin.json         plugin manifest
│   └── marketplace.json    lets this repo act as its own marketplace
├── skills/
│   └── rust-best-practices/
│       ├── SKILL.md
│       └── references/
│           ├── google-rust-style-guide.md
│           ├── rust-api-guidelines.md
│           ├── effective-rust.md
│           ├── rust-design-patterns.md
│           └── microsoft-rust-guidelines.md
└── README.md

Testing the skill

skills/rust-best-practices/evals/ holds three test cases in the layout claude plugin eval reads: a library API design task, an application CLI task, and a refactor-this-module task with an input file. Each case has the prompt, a description of a good result, and one assertion per file under graders/. Run them with and without the skill from the skill directory:

claude plugin eval . --allow-tools Write,Edit,Bash --scaffold

These are real model runs and are billed. In the last comparison the skill passed 29 of 30 assertions against 24 of 30 without it, at roughly a third more tokens per task.

Updating

Edit the skill, bump version in .claude-plugin/plugin.json, commit, and push. Installed users pick up the new version with:

claude plugin update beautiful-rust

Validate before pushing:

claude plugin validate .

Sources and attribution

The guidance in this skill is a synthesis. The five digests in skills/rust-best-practices/references/ are paraphrased summaries written for this project; they restate each source's advice in condensed form and link back to the original. Read the originals for the full reasoning.

The skill text, the digests, the banner, and the generator script in this repository are MIT licensed (see LICENSE). The crab is a crab, not the Rust mascot.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.