Is it even worth sharing messy hand-written code anymore

108 points Any_Good_2682 55 comments

I don't want to start another debate on LLMs. Personally, I use them to explain cryptic compiler errors or to generate regex, which saves me time. But like the recent posts here, I've made the conscious choice to write my actual logic by hand. Not because I'm a purist, but because I'm trying to actually learn Rust, specifically how async/await really works under the hood with Tokio.
However, the current state of this subreddit makes me hesitate to show anything. I've spent the last two months building a custom TUI (Terminal User Interface) resource monitor. It's not groundbreaking. It's built on ratatui and sysinfo. It’s probably full of unnecessary .clone() calls and I'm pretty sure my error handling is just a bunch of .unwrap() calls waiting to panic.
But it's my code. I fought with the borrow checker for days to get the data refresh threads working properly without race conditions.
The problem is, when I look at the "New" tab, I see two things: obviously low-effort AI wrappers that get roasted, or genuine beginners getting caught in the crossfire. I'm terrified that if I post my repo, people won't offer constructive criticism on my terrible lifetime management. Instead, they'll see a generic project structure or a slightly awkward README (English isn't my first language either) and just dismiss it as "more AI slop" or low-effort karma farming.
I used to love the idea of open-sourcing my learning projects to get advice from seasoned Rustaceans. Now, I feel like unless I'm releasing a production-ready crate that reinvents the wheel perfectly, I'm just adding to the noise.
Is there still space here for "bad" human code that is trying to get better, or has the AI flood made everyone too cynical to check? I'm honestly close to just keeping this on a private repo forever