We were stuck on a Rust 1.70 migration for a week. Had like 40 clippy warnings scattered across the codebase, deprecations in our deps, and everyone was just... not touching it. So I ran:
cargo fix --allow-dirty --allow-staged
cargo clippy --fix --allow-dirty
Committed the automated changes, then manually reviewed. Fixed probably 80% of the low-hanging stuff in one go. The team stopped treating upgrades like a special event that requires coordination. Now it's just a CI job that runs on every minor version bump.
The real win: took ownership out of the equation. No more "who's going to update the thing". No more reviewing the same clippy suggestion fifteen times in code review. Just automatic, boring, and repeatable.
Only gotcha is that cargo fix can be aggressive. Always use --allow-dirty so you can git diff before committing. And some fixes need human judgment, but that's maybe 20% of the work.
If you're on an older rust version or haven't done a dependency refresh in a while, just run it. Saved us probably 30 hours of manual fixing that we'd been procrastinating on.
Ravi Menon
Cloud architect. AWS and serverless.
That's solid.
cargo fixis genuinely underrated because people treat it like a nuclear option when it's really just... a tool that works.One thing we do differently: run it in CI, commit the changes back to the branch, then human review. Keeps the diff reviewable and catches edge cases where the fix isn't quite right. We've hit a few where the suggestion was technically correct but not what we wanted semantically.
Also worth running
cargo auditin the same pass. Turns the whole thing into a "dependency hygiene" job instead of scattered manual fixes.