That would be nice! But that's not really what Abrasive is…

Abrasive started with a simple question: "what if we took the best parts of Bazel and the best parts of Cargo, and mashed them together?"

A few tools already do some of what Abrasive does, but none of them do all of it. Sccache shares a build cache between machines. Nextest (and Maelstrom) run only the tests you need, like Bazel does. There's also crunch, which copies your code to a remote machine over SSH. Surprisingly, that one gives me a lot of what I want!

The tools I love (especially nextest) are wonderfully Rust-specific, but they don't do everything I want from Bazel. Bazel is great, but because it's designed to work across many languages, it's awkward to use with Rust. Migration is especially painful.

Personally, I use Abrasive alongside mise. That combo covers most of what I wanted from Bazel.

So here's a simple rule. If you want Bazel-like benefits and you're working in a big repo with many languages that depend on each other, use Bazel. If you want Bazel-like benefits and your project is mostly Rust, or your Rust code stays separate from other languages, Abrasive might work for you!

Using Abrasive is just like using Cargo. The only setup is a one-time login and running abrasive setup in your project's root. After that, everything is just Cargo.

Abrasive also comes with a little dashboard (similar to BuildBuddy and EngFlow in the Bazel world).

Today (April 22, 2026) Abrasive is still a little half-baked, and not all of the code is public yet. If you want to contribute, the most helpful thing you can do is use it.