Developer exlee streamlined their Rust utility tmplr by automating documentation generation during the build process. Faced with manually updating version numbers and text across the README, CLI help, and Cargo.toml, they turned to build.rs scripts. This pre-build hook now executes CUE commands to pull data from a centralized configuration, eliminating tedious copy-paste work and version synchronization errors.

Rust's build scripts offer powerful hooks into the compilation pipeline. By calling the CUE data language, the script exports specific values directly into source code and markdown files. This approach allows developers to maintain a single source of truth for documentation strings and code constants. It's a pragmatic solution that keeps technical writing and development in lockstep without external tooling.

The workflow generates the full README.md and CHANGELOG.md files, plus injects help text directly into the binary. This ensures the command-line interface and project documentation never drift out of sync. It represents a growing trend of using configuration-as-code to solve maintenance headaches in software projects. Automation here isn't just convenient; it prevents common release errors.

Developers looking to replicate this can inspect the open-source tmplr repository for the full implementation. The setup requires a solid understanding of both Rust's build system and CUE syntax. However, the payoff is a cleaner commit history and the confidence that generated artifacts are always accurate. This pattern is adaptable to other languages with similar build-time capabilities.