If you're interested in a GPU-rendered Rust UI framework, then maybe skip this vibe coded project, and check out some of following established projects:
List is hand-picked list, ordered by crates.io downloads. I had an LLM fetch the download counts and links. Webview based UI like Tauri and Dioxus Desktop are excluded. As are bindings to native toolkits and GTK.
https://crates.io/crates/dioxus-native was released 3 months ago and does not have a link to GitHub, I do not think it can be considered as established project yet.
IMO, the top GUI framework crates for Rust are windows or native-windows-gui, objc2 or icrate for MacOS and gtk4-rs for Linux only. Actually for MacOS / iOS I'd use uniffi to embed the rust core in a SwiftUI app.
In 2026 IMO it's much better to use an LLM to keep 3 separate native front ends in sync than it is to try and use any sort of cross platform UI.
Keeping 3 separate native front ends in sync with custom visual components means you end up building a cross-platform UI. The only apps you can build without custom components are trivial ones.
All 3 have a way of embedding webviews. In my perhaps limited experience, all desire for custom visual components are either specious or for read-only presentation views. In my opinion all controls should be native, but if you ask for a fancy data presentation I have no qualms reaching for a webview.
Yeah, have you tried to do anything in egui? I tried today a ComboBox, but I wanted one with filter input box, "X" icon to clear it, and automatic focus.
I've given up when the code reached 300 lines and was still buggy/not working.
egui is not mature. I'd prefer declarative approach, data binding, and styling. Therefore will skip egui.
i've built pretty complex stuff in egui. any modern agent will one-shot that component, so i'd say it's more just a lack of familiarity with the library.
I find this line pretty sad actually, what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand? What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?
Or human is completely removed from the development whatsoever..
> I find this line pretty sad actually, what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand? What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?
Then they would be better off contributing to a project that welcomes them.
> what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand?
It's up to the maintainer. Sometimes it's just easier to listen to what's needed and do it the way you know and are efficient with than to review someone else's code.
> What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?
There's nothing stopping them. They can even publish it in a fork.
Yep. There's other projects that have a "we want your ideas, but not your code" policy (like SQLite and Lua), but the "just tell your agent to tell our agent what to do" framing makes me depressed.
I did the same for a vibecoded project [0] but I would never do this for a human-written project. Simply put, if most contributions are similarly vibecoded and/or they will be reviewed/treated as such, then how is a PR/review from an unaffiliated agent any better than one managed by the project curator. Of course that human curation still needs to occur.
This is a natural progression (only on these types of projects). We accepted contributions because it actually helped and they were difficult and time consuming. When that is no longer the case, contributions are a burden, the actual problem/idea is the real value, hence the request to open the issue.
My main concern with this would be that for a library in particular I need a stable API and behavior (Hyrum's law). I do not know to what extent a fully autonomous agentic approach can ensure that. Note: I don't see a problem with preferring issues over pull requests (many of which would be poorly coded slop), just fully automating the handling.
Also a bit wild to assume that no person will just create an issue manually. This is not something I'd normally use an agent for.
It sounds like a black hat penetration tester's nirvana. All you have to do is open the right issue to trick the model into installing the right security vulnerability or backdoor, or better yet, a series of small security vulnerabilities that can be chained to create a tailor-made exploit. It's practically a hacker's choose-your-own adventure.
I suspect they'd be manually filtering which issues/features their agents attempt to fix/implement. Otherwise you end up with all sorts of features that simply make no sense for the project.
The approach is at least better than accepting slop PRs that could have backdoors injected into them.
Headless part is neat, but agents can already drive apps and take screenshots. As a side note, I have agent driving android tv using wireless adb and hdmi capture card + mpv rpc, its fun to watch.
Looks interesting, especially the headless part. Been building various apps lately for ios/ipados/macos for personal use and I would love something like this that would be truly cross platform. Xcode with agent use has been really nice to work with, and t3.code support for emulators has been amazing to use.
An approach I've found useful, albeit for a DSL that ships a binary for execution, is to give a way for the LLM agent to get a high-level topic list so it can drill down all the way to specific language/API implementation details.
Perhaps with this project the author could make a website that does the same?
When I made my ow GPU-renderered framework I found that it was possible to render the entire UI in one call/shader to the UI. All primitives and styles can be passed as a updatable data blob that the single GPU shader handles in one call. Do most of the GPU-rendered frameworks do it this way?
It has some tradeoffs to consider but seems quite good overall.
What is benefit of GPU-rendered UI? In regular 2d apps where I can select enable/disable GPU rendering, disabling doesn't make app feel slower, but it drastically reduces RAM and VRAM usage (VRAM is the one I care about, as I run local models). Why so many UI frameworks brag that they are GPU-rendered?
Other people have different hardware and different goals. A year or so ago I worked on a Linux laptop that was dog-slow. If I didn't enable GPU-rendering for the UI, it competed for the very limited CPU.
Using less power is generally the main benefit. On lower end hardware you may also notice a performance difference, depending on what the UI is trying to display.
It would be fun to port some apps over to this, I'm worried at the speed it moves, It would be hard to settle on a commit. I'd rather fast updates over slow, but I feel like I'd have very little trust on this between updates, especially how many things could be broken after updating.
Sorry, what? I feel like I've studied the Rust UI ecosystem pretty well, and the examples look nice, but if I've learned anything it's that "native" and "GPU-rendered" are oxymoronic.
Likely the fonts will be fuzzy on various platforms, accessibility will be under-baked and it will land in the bucket with every other UI framework depending on winit. I like the personalities at anomaly, but I'm quite confused about what's even driving a decision to build something like this versus contributing to egui, GPUI, Iced, etc.
It's definitely possible to do sharp fonts in the Rust GUI ecosystem (although you certainly won't get it out of the box). With the native text libraries if you want to (both Servo, Zed/GPUI, and anything using Skia do this), or emulated with Skrifa + Vello.
Yeah. Presumably "native" here just means "not Electron", which is the sales pitch for most AI-generated Rust libraries these days. ("Tell your agent to rewrite your Electron app into Rust~! :rocket emoji:")
I have the same annoyance. It's continually maddening to see "native" plastered everywhere only for it to be some non-native junk. I miss when native meant something like Qt.
Qt is an interesting case, because it doesn't use the native platform's widget code*, but does a good job of looking and behaving as though it does. That's usually close enough for me.
Various other toolkits have tried this approach, but unfortunately, I'm not aware of any others that succeed. Common deficiencies include keyboard navigation and text rendering.
*(Except on Qt-based desktops like KDE Plasma, of course.)
I've been thinking a lot about the term "native" as I come from mobile. When writing a core in Rust (which I like to do), and then layering on the operating system's UI SDK components per platform (which I also like to do), what is native and what isn't, especially when you throw in React Native to the discussion?
I like your definition quite a bit, but I need another word for, "code that doesn't need a runtime to execute."
I ended up using "experience layer" to describe the SDK components.
Changing times. Nowadays a lot of software UIs are developed by people with a web UI background. Those people won’t learn the OS-native UIs because that would mean they’d give up on their existing knowledge. Because of that native means “not running in an embedded web browser” to many nowadays.
Native often means "not a wrapper around a webview".
If you define it as "using the widgets provided by the operating system", then "native" is by definition incompatible with "cross-platform." And what does that mean on Linux, where the operating system doesn't provide widgets? Are gtk and Qt not native?
When discussing GUI toolkits, "native" should be understood to mean "native to the host's graphical environment".
"Native to the OS" might or might not be equivalent, depending on the OS and what one considers "OS" to mean. (Does it mean a kernel? A desktop distro? Something else?) Because of this ambiguity, it's not a very practical way to approach the discussion. Different people attach different meanings to that phrase.
Some frameworks are native to Qt. Others are native to Gtk. Practically none are native to Linux. ;)
I don't think "cross-platform" is incompatible with "native". It has been achieved more than once using toolkit wrappers, usually selected at build time.
I was thinking "Builds and tests with a fast-moving Rust code base like this must be painful", then I noticed the total absence of tests: https://github.com/anomalyco/rune/commits/dev/
You're not shifting left unless you guarantee local tests always run, faithfully to production. That rarely happens. Local testing should be supplementary. We use https://hk.jdx.dev/
We do ensure this, requiring signed proof, running in containers that would be identical to github runners (more or less). Now, this could be spoofed by an engineer, but we operate in a high trust environment
This is what a vibe coded UI framework looks like.
Have a read of the clean documentation that they never wrote or read. [0]
All the clean code, architecture principles thrown out of the window in favour of hundreds of code smells, anti-patterns, zero tests, and tons of unmaintainable slop.
Damn, this README is more of a DONTREADME. Even the root README is for agents, not people. The more I see stuff like this, the more I think about becoming a welder or a carpenter...
The site is wild, but the little triangles in the bottom right corners of each window don't work properly on chrome desktop in windows 11. They aren't clickable, you can only resize the windows horizontally. Which seems weird considering how polished the rest of it looks.
It's a fun tech demo, egui isn't meant to make websites. It's primarily for integration into games/other real-time-3D-rendered applications, and secondarily for GUI applications via eframe.
But I agree, I think they would be better served by making a normal website and linking to the demo prominently (For comparison, see iced's website https://iced.rs, which is great IMO)
If you're interested in a GPU-rendered Rust UI framework, then maybe skip this vibe coded project, and check out some of following established projects:
List is hand-picked list, ordered by crates.io downloads. I had an LLM fetch the download counts and links. Webview based UI like Tauri and Dioxus Desktop are excluded. As are bindings to native toolkits and GTK.https://crates.io/crates/dioxus-native was released 3 months ago and does not have a link to GitHub, I do not think it can be considered as established project yet.
IMO, the top GUI framework crates for Rust are windows or native-windows-gui, objc2 or icrate for MacOS and gtk4-rs for Linux only. Actually for MacOS / iOS I'd use uniffi to embed the rust core in a SwiftUI app.
In 2026 IMO it's much better to use an LLM to keep 3 separate native front ends in sync than it is to try and use any sort of cross platform UI.
An advantage of this approach is that everyone's screen readers and other accessibility tools actually work with your app.
Keeping 3 separate native front ends in sync with custom visual components means you end up building a cross-platform UI. The only apps you can build without custom components are trivial ones.
All 3 have a way of embedding webviews. In my perhaps limited experience, all desire for custom visual components are either specious or for read-only presentation views. In my opinion all controls should be native, but if you ask for a fancy data presentation I have no qualms reaching for a webview.
There's also relm4 which builds a Elm-like paradigm on top of gtk4-rs.
Yeah, have you tried to do anything in egui? I tried today a ComboBox, but I wanted one with filter input box, "X" icon to clear it, and automatic focus.
I've given up when the code reached 300 lines and was still buggy/not working.
egui is not mature. I'd prefer declarative approach, data binding, and styling. Therefore will skip egui.
i've built pretty complex stuff in egui. any modern agent will one-shot that component, so i'd say it's more just a lack of familiarity with the library.
Brutal and based
Sort of a digression, but it's the first time I've seen something like this:
Pretty interesting approach, compared to receiving a zillion potentially sloppy PRs. Open source in the age of LLMs.. ("agent source"?)I find this line pretty sad actually, what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand? What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?
Or human is completely removed from the development whatsoever..
> I find this line pretty sad actually, what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand? What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?
Then they would be better off contributing to a project that welcomes them.
> what if someone wants to contribute code, written by hand?
It's up to the maintainer. Sometimes it's just easier to listen to what's needed and do it the way you know and are efficient with than to review someone else's code.
> What if some beginner finds this project interesting and wants to invest own time into it?
There's nothing stopping them. They can even publish it in a fork.
While I sympathize I think we all know a majority of contributions would not be hand written. This is optimizing for the reality we're in.
You could fork and reference it in the issue if you still wanted to contribute.
Just take your hand written code and have it send it as the request to the AI.
Yep. There's other projects that have a "we want your ideas, but not your code" policy (like SQLite and Lua), but the "just tell your agent to tell our agent what to do" framing makes me depressed.
Those days are over
Why would you want to contribute thoughtfully written code to a slop project?
I had a Nix issue. Agents fixed it in 5 min.
Of course, one could conclude that another agents screwed up before, still was a good experience.
I did the same for a vibecoded project [0] but I would never do this for a human-written project. Simply put, if most contributions are similarly vibecoded and/or they will be reviewed/treated as such, then how is a PR/review from an unaffiliated agent any better than one managed by the project curator. Of course that human curation still needs to occur.
This is a natural progression (only on these types of projects). We accepted contributions because it actually helped and they were difficult and time consuming. When that is no longer the case, contributions are a burden, the actual problem/idea is the real value, hence the request to open the issue.
0 - https://github.com/cretz/vitaslop
My main concern with this would be that for a library in particular I need a stable API and behavior (Hyrum's law). I do not know to what extent a fully autonomous agentic approach can ensure that. Note: I don't see a problem with preferring issues over pull requests (many of which would be poorly coded slop), just fully automating the handling.
Also a bit wild to assume that no person will just create an issue manually. This is not something I'd normally use an agent for.
It sounds like a black hat penetration tester's nirvana. All you have to do is open the right issue to trick the model into installing the right security vulnerability or backdoor, or better yet, a series of small security vulnerabilities that can be chained to create a tailor-made exploit. It's practically a hacker's choose-your-own adventure.
I am not sure about that.
Which gate is easier to maintain?
1. Check issues for malicious intent
2. Check PR for malicious intent.
I think in PR requests it is easier to introduce purposeful bugs or obfuscated code than it is to hide them in issues.
So I think gating on issues is easier and more secure.
I suspect they'd be manually filtering which issues/features their agents attempt to fix/implement. Otherwise you end up with all sorts of features that simply make no sense for the project.
The approach is at least better than accepting slop PRs that could have backdoors injected into them.
That seems a lot harder than if they accepted PRs like everyone else
Makes this (not a real) job posting seem all the more funny/relevant:
https://lovro-bikic.github.io/software-line-specialist/
> Every app can run headless, so an agent can render to PNG, dump the element tree and drive it with scripted input.
This is cool. I hope SwiftUI / UIKit borrow this idea for native mac apps.
You can do the same thing with swiftui. The surface you render to doesn't have to be visible at all.
Headless part is neat, but agents can already drive apps and take screenshots. As a side note, I have agent driving android tv using wireless adb and hdmi capture card + mpv rpc, its fun to watch.
How should I think about this, compared to GPUI (https://gpui.rs)? What are pros and cons?
Dax on Twitter: "we just couldn't get gpui to look good enough"
Does this have:
- Accessibility? E.g. Screen reader support?
- Alternative inputs? Full keyboard support?
- Full internationalization, including right-to-left and diacritics?
What happens when no GPU is available?
Just curious as this matters for it to be a serious library and not a proof of concept.
The most common rust UI framework I’m aware of, iced, completely fails on these metrics afaik.
Looks interesting, especially the headless part. Been building various apps lately for ios/ipados/macos for personal use and I would love something like this that would be truly cross platform. Xcode with agent use has been really nice to work with, and t3.code support for emulators has been amazing to use.
Re: Use it with your agent
An approach I've found useful, albeit for a DSL that ships a binary for execution, is to give a way for the LLM agent to get a high-level topic list so it can drill down all the way to specific language/API implementation details.
Perhaps with this project the author could make a website that does the same?
When I made my ow GPU-renderered framework I found that it was possible to render the entire UI in one call/shader to the UI. All primitives and styles can be passed as a updatable data blob that the single GPU shader handles in one call. Do most of the GPU-rendered frameworks do it this way?
It has some tradeoffs to consider but seems quite good overall.
What is benefit of GPU-rendered UI? In regular 2d apps where I can select enable/disable GPU rendering, disabling doesn't make app feel slower, but it drastically reduces RAM and VRAM usage (VRAM is the one I care about, as I run local models). Why so many UI frameworks brag that they are GPU-rendered?
Well, for one, it usually is much more energy-efficient: longer battery life, cooler computers, and more responsive under heavy (CPU) load.
Other people have different hardware and different goals. A year or so ago I worked on a Linux laptop that was dog-slow. If I didn't enable GPU-rendering for the UI, it competed for the very limited CPU.
Using less power is generally the main benefit. On lower end hardware you may also notice a performance difference, depending on what the UI is trying to display.
composition with transparencies is the main one
Broadly: In what circumstances, use cases, preferences etc would I use this instead of EGUI or GPUI?
The double-edged sword of choice!
I'd like to know this too. I'm building a egui app and it's fantastic. I have tons of custom drawing and stuff though
It would be fun to port some apps over to this, I'm worried at the speed it moves, It would be hard to settle on a commit. I'd rather fast updates over slow, but I feel like I'd have very little trust on this between updates, especially how many things could be broken after updating.
> native GPU-rendered Rust UI
Sorry, what? I feel like I've studied the Rust UI ecosystem pretty well, and the examples look nice, but if I've learned anything it's that "native" and "GPU-rendered" are oxymoronic.
Likely the fonts will be fuzzy on various platforms, accessibility will be under-baked and it will land in the bucket with every other UI framework depending on winit. I like the personalities at anomaly, but I'm quite confused about what's even driving a decision to build something like this versus contributing to egui, GPUI, Iced, etc.
It's definitely possible to do sharp fonts in the Rust GUI ecosystem (although you certainly won't get it out of the box). With the native text libraries if you want to (both Servo, Zed/GPUI, and anything using Skia do this), or emulated with Skrifa + Vello.
But I agree with the reset
Yeah. Presumably "native" here just means "not Electron", which is the sales pitch for most AI-generated Rust libraries these days. ("Tell your agent to rewrite your Electron app into Rust~! :rocket emoji:")
What does "native" mean to these people. Native UI means using the widgets provided by the operating system. This is not that.
I have the same annoyance. It's continually maddening to see "native" plastered everywhere only for it to be some non-native junk. I miss when native meant something like Qt.
Qt is an interesting case, because it doesn't use the native platform's widget code*, but does a good job of looking and behaving as though it does. That's usually close enough for me.
Various other toolkits have tried this approach, but unfortunately, I'm not aware of any others that succeed. Common deficiencies include keyboard navigation and text rendering.
*(Except on Qt-based desktops like KDE Plasma, of course.)
I've been thinking a lot about the term "native" as I come from mobile. When writing a core in Rust (which I like to do), and then layering on the operating system's UI SDK components per platform (which I also like to do), what is native and what isn't, especially when you throw in React Native to the discussion?
I like your definition quite a bit, but I need another word for, "code that doesn't need a runtime to execute."
I ended up using "experience layer" to describe the SDK components.
Changing times. Nowadays a lot of software UIs are developed by people with a web UI background. Those people won’t learn the OS-native UIs because that would mean they’d give up on their existing knowledge. Because of that native means “not running in an embedded web browser” to many nowadays.
Native often means "not a wrapper around a webview".
If you define it as "using the widgets provided by the operating system", then "native" is by definition incompatible with "cross-platform." And what does that mean on Linux, where the operating system doesn't provide widgets? Are gtk and Qt not native?
Adding to this...
When discussing GUI toolkits, "native" should be understood to mean "native to the host's graphical environment".
"Native to the OS" might or might not be equivalent, depending on the OS and what one considers "OS" to mean. (Does it mean a kernel? A desktop distro? Something else?) Because of this ambiguity, it's not a very practical way to approach the discussion. Different people attach different meanings to that phrase.
Some frameworks are native to Qt. Others are native to Gtk. Practically none are native to Linux. ;)
I don't think "cross-platform" is incompatible with "native". It has been achieved more than once using toolkit wrappers, usually selected at build time.
So it's a UI framework by agents, for agents?
why are we giving more accessibility to agents than to like disabled human users?
I wonder whether that results in better accessibility for disabled people in the end because agents can control UIs for them.
Rune, the rust ui framework, not to be confused with Rune, an embeddable dynamic programming language for Rust
Not to be confused with Rune, the development environment [0].
[0]: https://rune.build/
I was thinking "Builds and tests with a fast-moving Rust code base like this must be painful", then I noticed the total absence of tests: https://github.com/anomalyco/rune/commits/dev/
there are tests, no?
e.g. https://github.com/anomalyco/rune/tree/dev/crates/rune-kit/t...
Indeed. But why not run the tests in CI when merging to master?
Where I work, we've moved CI "left", all tests are run on the developers machine before merging
You're not shifting left unless you guarantee local tests always run, faithfully to production. That rarely happens. Local testing should be supplementary. We use https://hk.jdx.dev/
We do ensure this, requiring signed proof, running in containers that would be identical to github runners (more or less). Now, this could be spoofed by an engineer, but we operate in a high trust environment
This is interesting. Are you using an available product for managing these signatures, or did you write your own?
They ain't running in CI.
This is from the same guys that thought building a coding agent harness with "Bun" was a good idea
Another option is Crux, which lets use actual native UI:
https://redbadger.github.io/crux
Another Vibe coded slop which will probably be not maintained after 3-4 weeks.
This is what a vibe coded UI framework looks like.
Have a read of the clean documentation that they never wrote or read. [0]
All the clean code, architecture principles thrown out of the window in favour of hundreds of code smells, anti-patterns, zero tests, and tons of unmaintainable slop.
[0] https://github.com/anomalyco/rune/blob/dev/crates/rune/READM...
Wait, zero tests? It is super cheap to write tests these days. It is how you gate agent generated code from destroying production.
They have tests, this person is just wrong.
What are you talking about? They definitely have tests.
Damn, this README is more of a DONTREADME. Even the root README is for agents, not people. The more I see stuff like this, the more I think about becoming a welder or a carpenter...
Why do you say 0 tests? Are the other statements similarly precise?
You're not kidding - that README is not readable.
I don't thinks its intended to be read by humans
...what does this do? Is it just a vibecoded version of https://www.egui.rs/
The site is wild, but the little triangles in the bottom right corners of each window don't work properly on chrome desktop in windows 11. They aren't clickable, you can only resize the windows horizontally. Which seems weird considering how polished the rest of it looks.
it doesn’t look immediate mode to me?
It presumably powers OpenCode, the agent harness.
It doesn't, that's https://github.com/anomalyco/opentui.
The website for https://www.egui.rs sort of sucks, it took around 10 seconds to load and initialize for some reason.
It's a fun tech demo, egui isn't meant to make websites. It's primarily for integration into games/other real-time-3D-rendered applications, and secondarily for GUI applications via eframe.
But I agree, I think they would be better served by making a normal website and linking to the demo prominently (For comparison, see iced's website https://iced.rs, which is great IMO)
> For comparison, see iced's website https://iced.rs, which is great IMO
This isn't much better. It's super laggy with high CPU usage.
It doesn't even load if you don't have WebGL2.