The large language changes are a burden, but it's something I knew going into it. And so far in every case, it's been well worth it. For example, 0.15 introduced the std.Io.Writer overhaul, but I really love the new API. I haven't started the std.Io change yet for 0.16. We'll see. And honestly, LLMs make this all way less painful... even though they're not trained on it, agents are able to run builds, reference docs, and work their way through the upgrade with huge success.
I thought that finding contributors would be an issue, but it hasn't at all. There's a lot of people out there eager to use Zig, the language isn't hard to learn (as long as you're already familiar with systems concepts), etc. It has been good.
I'll think about more to say if I write about this more but overall, I'm very happy with the language, the community, and the leadership. All good.
I'm surprised to hear LLMs have been helpful. What little I tried to use them for with Zig, all the information was way too out of date. But I was mainly just doing research, not running an agent at the time, so that's probably why.
I've been slow on the agent pickup. The ethical issues really bother me (LLMs in general), though it's clear I'm not gonna have a choice in this industry so I've been caving recently. The persistent narrative that agents can build entire complex software systems is also irritating, because that clearly doesn't seem to align with reality.
I was thinking that downloading the full official documentation, separated by sections inside the repository someone is working on with Zig, could be useful, but maybe there are more optimal ways to approach this.
Thanks.