I had a ~200-line bash script that glued together a few AWS CLI calls, did some retries, and wrote a report. It worked, but nobody wanted to touch it.

I rewrote it in Rust over a weekend. The honest verdict:

Good:

• Typed config and real error handling
• Retries with backoff that I actually trust
• A binary I can drop on any machine

Bad:

• Compile times for a trivial tool
• AWS SDK is a lot of dependency surface

Would I do it again? For a tool other people run, yes. For a one-off, probably not — I'd write it in Python and spend the time on tests instead.

I'm learning Rust more seriously now. The borrow checker stopped feeling like an enemy around week three, which I'm told is normal.