> Honestly, despite all the hype around Rust in the community, the fact that AI can't handle lifetimes reliably makes me reluctant to use it. The AI constantly defaults to spamming .clone() or wrapping things in Rc, completely butchering idiomatic Rust and making the output a pain to work with.

This hasn't been true since around gpt-4.5 on the OpenAI side of things. The 5.x models have been pretty much solid on Rust for a while now.