Chapter 2 -- The 50-Day Plan For Building A Personal Assistant Agentic System (PAAS)

PHASE 1: FOUNDATIONS (Days 1-10)

Day 1-2: Rust Lang & Tauri Foundation For Multi-Agent System Architecture

These first days of the foundation phase focus on understanding something about Rust language as well as the Cargo, the Package Manager for Rust, along with crates.io Tauri, so that that it will make sense as you design and implement the overall architecture for your multi-agent system. There will be more to learn about Rust/Tauri foundation than we can learn in two days, but the point is to fully immerse yourself in the world of Rust/Tauri development to lay the groundwork for your application and your understanding of what is possible. As we move through the rest of the next ten days, you will explore how multiple specialized agents can work together to accomplish complex tasks that would be difficult for a single agent. Understanding more of that architectures will reinforce the things that you will read about how Rust and Tauri can provide performance, security, and cross-platform capabilities that traditional web technologies cannot match. At first, just try to absorb as much of the Rust/Tauri excitement as much as you can, knowing that within a couple days, you will be establishing and starting to build the groundwork for a desktop application that can run intensive processing locally while still connecting to cloud services. By the end of the first week, your head might be swimming in possibilities, but you will be apply these concepts Rust/Tauri advocates gush about in Rust or Tauri to create a comprehensive architectural design for your PAAS that will guide the remainder of your development process.

FIRST thing ... each day ... READ this assignment over carefully, just to assure you understand the assignment. You are not required to actually DO the assignment, but you really have to UNDERSTAND what you are supposed to look over ... REMEMBER: This is not only about programming a PAAS, you are programming yourself to be an autodidact so if you want to rip up the script and do it a better way, go for it...

  • Morning (3h): Learn Rust and Tauri basics with an eye multi-agent system design Examine, explore, and get completely immersed and lost in the Rust and Tauri realm, including not only reading the References, forking and examining repositories, logging in and lurking on dev communities, reading blogs, but of course also installing Rust and Rustlings and diving off into the deep end of Rust, with special eye tuned to the following concepts:

    • Agent communication protocols: Study different approaches for inter-agent communication, from simple API calls to more complex message-passing systems that enable asynchronous collaboration. Learn about optimizing serialization formats perhaps with MessagePack or Protocol Buffers or other approaches that offer performance advantages over JSON; there is an almost overwhelming set of issues/opportunities that come with serialization formats implemented in Rust. At some point, you will probably want start experiment with how Tauri's inter-process communication (IPC) bridge facilitates communication between frontend and backend components.
    • Task division strategies: Explore methods for dividing complex workflows among specialized agents, including functional decomposition and hierarchical organization. Learn how Rust's ownership model and concurrency features can enable safe parallel processing of tasks across multiple agents, and how Tauri facilitates splitting computation between a Rust backend and Svelte frontend.
    • System coordination patterns and Rust concurrency: Understand coordination patterns like supervisor-worker and peer-to-peer architectures that help multiple agents work together coherently. Study Rust's concurrency primitives including threads, channels, and async/await that provide safe parallelism for agent coordination, avoiding common bugs like race conditions and deadlocks that plague other concurrent systems.

  • Afternoon (3h): START thinking about the design of your PAAS architecture with Tauri integration With an eye to the following key highlighted areas, start thinkering and hacking in earnest, find and then fork repositories and steal/adapt code, with the certain knowledge that you are almost certainly just going to throw the stuff that you build now away. Make yourself as dangerous as possible as fast as possible -- build brainfarts that don't work -- IMMERSION and getting lost to the point of total confusion, debugging a mess and even giving up and starting over is what training is for!

    • Define core components and interfaces: Identify the major components of your system including data collectors, processors, storage systems, reasoning agents, and user interfaces, defining clear boundaries between Rust and JavaScript/Svelte code. Create a modular architecture where performance-critical components are implemented in Rust while user-facing elements use Svelte for reactive UI updates.
    • Plan data flows and processing pipelines: Map out how information will flow through your system from initial collection to final summarization, identifying where Rust's performance advantages can be leveraged for data processing. Design asynchronous processing pipelines using Rust's async ecosystem (tokio or async-std) for efficient handling of I/O-bound operations like API requests and file processing.
    • Create architecture diagrams and set up Tauri project: Develop comprehensive visual representations of your system architecture showing both the agent coordination patterns and the Tauri application structure. Initialize a basic Tauri project with Svelte as the frontend framework, establishing project organization, build processes, and communication patterns between the Rust backend and Svelte frontend.