Summary
Jonathan Kelley, co-founder of Dioxus Labs, delivers a conference talk tracing the five-year journey of Dioxus — a cross-platform application framework written in Rust that has grown to nearly 37,000 GitHub stars and an estimated 200 million end users. Kelley covers the framework’s technical architecture, including Blitz, a custom HTML/CSS rendering engine built from Firefox’s CSS engine that produces bundles under 5 MB and consumes less than 50 MB of RAM at runtime, and Subsecond, a hot-reload engine for native compiled code in Rust, C, and C++ that patches running applications in under 100 milliseconds.
The second half of the talk pivots to AI coding agents, which Kelley says have transformed how the small Dioxus team ships features over the past six months. He offers a concrete case study: implementing Kotlin and Swift build-system plugins — work that took React Native years of manual development — was completed in roughly two to three weeks using coding agents, with core implementation finished in a single day and the remainder spent on testing on real devices. Kelley frames agents as patient, documentation-sifting assistants that excel at knowledge-heavy problems — reading bespoke APIs, reverse-engineering binaries, and navigating unfamiliar build systems.
The talk is candid about limits: Dioxus maintains strict code-quality standards because millions of apps depend on the framework, so agents are used as assistants rather than autonomous contributors. Kelley argues that maintainability of the underlying substrate is what determines the velocity everything built on top can achieve.
📺 Source: AI Engineer · Published September 11, 2026
🏷️ Format: Keynote Launch
