Niko Matsakis: Symposium: community-oriented agentic development

I’m very excited to announce the . Symposium’s goal is to let everyone in the Rust community participate in making agentic development better. The core idea is that crate authors should be able to vend skills, MCP servers, and other extensions, in addition to code. The Symposium tool then installs those extensions automatically based on your dependencies. After all, who knows how to use a crate better than the people who maintain it?

If you want to read more details about how Symposium works, I refer you to the .

Despite Rust’s popularity as an agentic coding target, the Rust community right now are basically bystanders when it comes to the experience of people writing Rust with agents; I want us to have a means of influencing it directly.

Enter Symposium. With Symposium, Crate authors can package up skills etc and then Symposium will automatically make them available for your agent. Symposium also takes care of bridging the small-but-very-real gaps between agents (e.g., each has their own hook format, and some of them use .agents/skills and some use .claude/skills, etc).

Example: the assert-struct crate

Let me give you an example. Consider the . But it seems silly for everybody who uses the crate to repeat that content.

…but wouldn’t it be better the crate could teach the agent itself?

With Symposium, teaching your agent how to use your dependencies should not be necessary. Instead, your crates can publish their own skills or other extensions.

The way this works is that the assert-struct crate defines the skill once, centrally, in its own repository ^{with a pointer to the assert-struct repository. Any time that the assert-struct repository updates that skill, the updates are automatically synchronized for you. Neat! (You can also embed skills directly in the}

What kind of extensions does Symposium support?

Skills, hooks, and MCP Servers, for now.

Why does Symposium have a centralized repository?

Currently we allow skill content to be defined in a decentralized fashion but we require that a plugin be added to our ) and to reconfirm peoples’ biases instead of challenging their ideas. And I’m worried about .. My goal with Symposium and other projects is to be part of the solution, finding ways to leverage LLMs that are net positive: opening doors, not closing them.

Extensibility: because everybody has something to offer

Fundamentally, the reason I am working on Symposium is that I believe everybody has something unique to offer. I see the appeal of strongly opinionated systems that reflect the brilliant vision of a particular person. But to me, the most beautiful systems are the ones that everybody gets to build together. It’s why I love VSCode’s extension system, which has so many great gems^{. And that is what it’s all about.}