THE MANUAL

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

It's A Template — Anti-Founder Website In Pure Rust

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).

How to instantiate your own

# 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.

What This Specific Instance Is

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:

• Reserves the cochranblock name on crates.io.
• Surfaces the catalog of every Cochran Block crate via cargo doc --open -p cochranblock or docs.rs/cochranblock.
• Makes The Anti-Founder Manifesto reachable through the Rust toolchain, not just through a website.

Receipts

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.

Use It

# 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);
    }
}

Reaching The Manual

The manual is reachable through a deliberately self-referential URL pattern. Every URL matching manual.cochranblock.org/(manual/)* resolves here:

• cochranblock.org/manual
• manual.cochranblock.org
• manual.cochranblock.org/manual
• manual.cochranblock.org/manual/manual
• … arbitrarily nested. Every (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.

Chicken & Egg Bypass

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.

The Wall of Laptops Pattern

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:

• Old laptop. Lid open, monitor on, keyboard ignored.
• Debian Trixie netinstall, server profile, no desktop environment. GUI weighs too much for the use case.
• htop on tty1 via a one-shot systemd unit (htop-wall.service) that disables getty@tty1 and points StandardInput=tty/TTYPath=/dev/tty1 at the kernel framebuffer console.
• Console font sized to viewing distance via setfont -C /dev/tty1 -d <Lat15-TerminusNNxNN.psf.gz>. The -d flag doubles the glyph for far viewing.
• Backlight pegged with a udev rule that chgrp videos /sys/class/backlight/<dev>/brightness on add, then writes max_brightness to it.
• htop's column set narrowed to 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.

The Anti-Founder Doctrine

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 sits at the top of this page. ↑ Scroll up — the doctrine is the first half of this manual.