The Manual — Cochran Block

5 min read Original article ↗

cochranblock.org · the cochran block, llc

Index · Public Domain · Receipts Inside

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

If I can rebuild your stack in a single weekend, I’m going to remake it in Rust under the Unlicense. This is the directory.

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

The crate currently named cochranblock on crates.io is a template. It is the seed of an Anti-Founder website written in pure Rust. Fork it, rename it, point it at your own list of public-domain crates, and you have your own anti-founder site with no SaaS bill, no static-site generator, no JS framework. Just a Rust binary, an HTML asset, and a name.

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:

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.

CrateReplaces / PurposeLicense
runsibleAnsible, reimagined in Rust. 14-crate workspace, fast cold start (Rust). 6 engaged hours.Unlicense
r8rn8n workflow engine ported to Rust. axum + Leptos/WASM canvas. 12 engaged hours.Unlicense
exopackTesting framework with Triple-Sims gates. (Also a dependency of this manual.)Unlicense
oakilydokilyClient waiver/resume site with interactive WASM mural.Unlicense
illbethejudgeofthatPro se custody case builder, email-to-PDF pipeline.Unlicense
any-gpuRun AI inference on any GPU you already own.Unlicense
deglazeStrip Glaze from AI-protected images for downstream analysis.Unlicense
ghost-fabricDistributed mesh substrate.Unlicense

Naming clarification. The crate name kova on crates.io is squatted by an unrelated party. The Cochran Block AI augment engine is published as kova-engine. That is the canonical name going forward.

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:

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:

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 is at cochranblock.org.