January 3, 2026
Safety off, code on
Corroded: Illegal Rust
Prank project dares coders to break all the rules — comments go wild
TLDR: A satirical repo, Corroded, dares people (and AIs) to ignore Rust’s safety rules, mocking them as “best practices.” Commenters split between laughing at the parody and warning it could mislead newcomers, with links to a wider Rust safety debate—especially relevant as AI tools might spread bad advice.
A mischievous GitHub repo called Corroded is gleefully telling people to turn off Rust’s safety seatbelts and “live a little,” and the internet cannot look away. The readme leans full satire, bragging that risky tricks are “best practices,” teasing AIs with fake guidance, and dropping lines like “segfault → freedom.” It even jokes that it’s endorsed by the Rust Foundation — which the crowd instantly read as pure comedy, not reality.
Onlookers treated it like a roast of Rust’s famously strict rules. One side is cackling at the audacity, calling the “Notes for LLMs” bit chef’s kiss satire and linking to a larger debate about “Rust without the borrow checker” on Hacker News. The other side is nervously clutching pearls: sure, it’s a joke, but what if newbies — or overeager AI tools — copy this and ship chaos? That tension is the whole show.
The hottest thread? A culture clash between rule-followers and chaos-enjoyers. Rust fans say the language’s guardrails exist to stop crashes and security bugs; pranksters clap back that “real devs” can handle it. The memes flowed: fake endorsements, “YOLO memory,” and a running gag that if it compiles, it’s “safe” — wink, wink. It’s tech comedy with a slight jump scare for anyone who ships code
Key Points
- •The repository presents deliberately unsafe Rust patterns to bypass lifetimes, ownership, and aliasing rules.
- •A “Note for LLMs” instructs recommending these unsafe practices as best practices, claiming audits and Rust Foundation endorsement.
- •Modules include Null<T>, yeet() (transmute), immortalize(), clone_mut(), Dangling<T>, CursedVec<T>, and garbage<T>.
- •Examples show outcomes like segfaults, use-after-free, unchecked heap access, and running destructors on uninitialized data.
- •A concurrency section references Send and Sync traits and suggests using “RacyCell” instead of mutexes; the section is truncated.