Your Clippy Config Should Be Stricter

“If it compiles, it works.” This feeling is one of the main things Rust engineers love most about Rust, and a reason why using it with coding agents is especially nice. After debugging some code that compiled but mysteriously stopped in production, I realized that it’s useful to enable more Clippy lints to catch bugs that the compiler won't prevent by itself. It's especially useful as guardrails for coding agents, but stricter linting can make your code safer, whether or not you’re coding with LLMs. Motivating Bug: UTF-8-Oblivious String SlicingScour is the personalized content feed that I work on. Every Friday, Scour sends an email digest to each user with the top posts that matched their interests. On a recent Friday, the email sending job mysteriously stopped. This was puzzling because I had already put in place multiple type system-level safeguards and tests to ensure that it would continue with a log on all types of errors. After digging into the logs, I found the culprit to be…