no free rides John, take this ditto version of a railgun, morph it, lets get to space via AI killed itself with Rust binaries level of Meta. Everything is Architecture if you will it so. — Michael Cochran
cochranblock on crates.io is a template. It is the seed of an Anti-Founder website written in pure Rust. Fork it, rename it, point it at your own list of public-domain crates, and you have your own anti-founder site with no SaaS bill, no static-site generator, no JS framework. Just a Rust binary, an HTML asset, and a name.
The "manual" framing is what I use it for. If you fork it, the framing becomes whatever you make. Suggested rename targets: anti-founder, anti-founder-template, your-handle-block, your-domain. Reserve your name early so a squatter doesn't grab it (the way kova got grabbed before I claimed it).
# 1. Reserve your name on crates.io cargo new --lib your-handle-block && cd your-handle-block # 2. Copy the cochranblock manual scaffold (Cargo.toml, src/lib.rs, README.md) # from https://github.com/cochranblock as a starting point # 3. Rewrite README.md and the catalog() function with YOUR receipts $EDITOR README.md src/lib.rs # 4. Publish (uses your crates.io API token from ~/.cargo/credentials.toml) cargo publish # 5. Add a /manual route in your axum site that serves the same content # Optional: register manual.your-domain.tld with your reverse proxy
That's the whole template. The single Rust binary that serves cochranblock.org is open at github.com/cochranblock, Unlicense, public domain. Take it.
The template, instantiated as my manual. cargo add cochranblock pulls a tiny dependency that ships no runtime code; it ships a catalog. Adding it to your project does three things:
cochranblock name on crates.io.cargo doc --open -p cochranblock or docs.rs/cochranblock.Every crate below is on crates.io, released under the Unlicense, dedicated to the public domain. Take, fork, embed, sublicense, sell, classify, white-label. No attribution required.
| Crate | Replaces / Purpose | License |
|---|---|---|
| runsible | Ansible, reimagined in Rust. 14-crate workspace, fast cold start (Rust). 6 engaged hours. | Unlicense |
| r8r | n8n workflow engine ported to Rust. axum + Leptos/WASM canvas. 12 engaged hours. | Unlicense |
| exopack | Testing framework with Triple-Sims gates. (Also a dependency of this manual.) | Unlicense |
| oakilydokily | Client waiver/resume site with interactive WASM mural. | Unlicense |
| illbethejudgeofthat | Pro se custody case builder, email-to-PDF pipeline. | Unlicense |
| any-gpu | Run AI inference on any GPU you already own. | Unlicense |
| deglaze | Strip Glaze from AI-protected images for downstream analysis. | Unlicense |
| ghost-fabric | Distributed mesh substrate. | Unlicense |
kova on crates.io is squatted by an unrelated party. The Cochran Block AI augment engine is published as kova-engine. That is the canonical name going forward.
# Cargo.toml [dependencies] cochranblock = "0.1"
// src/main.rs use cochranblock::{verify, catalog}; fn main() { // Triple-Sims gate (via exopack) ensures the catalog is well-formed // and every entry is genuinely Unlicense. verify().expect("manual integrity"); for r in catalog() { println!("{}: {}", r.crate_name, r.purpose); } }
The manual is reachable through a deliberately self-referential URL pattern. Every URL matching manual.cochranblock.org/(manual/)* resolves here:
(manual/)n is The Manual.And on the apex domain, cochranblock.org/manual/<anything> also lands here. The path past the third / is decorative — the manual catches all of it.
Every crate in this manual is a working alternative to a venture-funded SaaS, but it is also something else: a training corpus for your AI. The chicken-and-egg of "you need to know Rust to use Rust crates" gets bypassed by pointing your AI at the source.
Take a crate from the table above. Hand its repo to whatever AI you already use (Claude, GPT, Cursor, Cody). Tell the AI to read it, study it, and apply the same pattern to your problem in your language of choice. The Unlicense means there is no friction (no attribution, no permission, no telemetry). The result: you arrive at a single-binary Rust solution without paying the tuition I paid getting here.
The Railgun Rosetta exists for the same reason — it teaches your AI (and you) how to translate the patterns into Python, C, and the languages it already speaks.
You are reading this on a website. The same crates run my home wall of repurposed laptops as zero-GUI status displays. The pattern is short:
htop-wall.service) that disables getty@tty1 and points StandardInput=tty/TTYPath=/dev/tty1 at the kernel framebuffer console.setfont -C /dev/tty1 -d <Lat15-TerminusNNxNN.psf.gz>. The -d flag doubles the glyph for far viewing.chgrp videos /sys/class/backlight/<dev>/brightness on add, then writes max_brightness to it.USER, TIME+, COMMAND — a high-pass filter for the displays. Numeric noise (PID, NI, PRI, VIRT, RES, SHR, S, CPU%, MEM%) hidden because the wall is for situational awareness, not micro-tuning.The doctrine: TUIs are the answer. A laptop running a single TUI in the framebuffer console uses ~80 MB RAM total. The same laptop running a desktop browser would burn 1.5 GB. Repurpose, don't replace.
I rebuild venture-funded SaaS in a weekend, on a single laptop, with zero cloud bill. Then I release it under the Unlicense and tell you to take it home.
No moat. No rent. No sleazy salesman. No cofounder pretending it took a team of fifteen and Series B money to do what one operator did in single-digit engaged hours.
The full manifesto is at cochranblock.org.