Getting Started

Hello! Welcome to this course, where we’ll learn to build a very cool and smart application leveraging Rust and GPT-4, which, when given a prompt for a certain web application, along with its template, will create an entire application for us and even test the code to see if the application is working! Let’s understand the tools and frameworks we’ll use in this course.

What is Rust?

What is GPT-4?

Course structure

This course is a small crash course on Rust, which is designed to introduce the very basic concepts and the most advanced ones:

• Learning the Rust Environment: We’ll learn how to create projects and libraries, run files, and more.

• Types and Memory Management: We’ll learn about datatypes in Rust and how they’re stored in memory in this section.

• Basic Rust Concepts: Once you have the basic knowledge about the semantics of the language, we’ll start learning the programming language. In this section, we’ll learn how variables are created and how we can set the flow of our program.

• Intermediate Rust Concepts: We’ll learn about generics, such as enums, traits, structs, etc. We’ll also learn about running tests on certain modules in our code (unit testing) and lifetimes.

• Advanced Rust Concepts: Finally, we’ll move on to the final section of the crash course, where we’ll learn about smart pointers and declarative and procedural macros.

Once we’ve developed an understanding of Rust, we’ll jump into the main project of our course. The end goal of this course is to design an application in Rust that can build web servers on its own, given only a prompt that tells it what kind of application is required. We’ll also utilize OpenAI’s API for their GPT-4 model to send requests and receive responses.

The modules for this project are distributed in the following manner:

• Web Template: In this section, we’ll build a template for a web server so that our model has some skeleton code to work with. We’ll also design new applications and learn Rust web development.

• Supporting Functions: In this section, we’ll create functions that call OpenAI’s API and process the response. We’ll build them in a readable way and also manage structures to hold our data and better manage the flow of information from one agent to another.

• Agents: We’ll create three structs that will handle the crux of the project. These structs will implement different functionalities, and we’ll refer to them as agents. In this section, we’ll design our three different agent structs, and each one will have a role in creating the application that we want our project to create.

• Testing: Finally, we’ll end the course by testing our application to see whether it creates web server applications as effectively as real software engineers would.

Prerequisites

Before we proceed further, make sure you meet the following prerequisites:

• Intermediate programming experience: You should have a solid grasp of programming concepts, though not necessarily in Rust. Familiarity with programming fundamentals in any language is sufficient.

• Understanding of web development: You don’t need to be an expert, but you should have some practical experience with web development. This could be in any programming language or framework. The key is to have a foundational understanding of how web applications are built and function.

• Problem-solving skills: Throughout this course, you might work on a project or test code on your local machine. It’s expected that you have the ability to independently research and solve problems you may encounter during development.

These prerequisites ensure you can fully engage with and benefit from the course content. If you meet these requirements, you’re ready to dive in!