Be interesting to see where Zig and ecosystem is in a few years with this general anti-LLM stance from it's core people. My guess is it'll just make it's way as a hobby language, left behind in the dust. Which is of course a perfectly fine thing for some.
> I would still recommend not putting all your eggs in one basket just yet because [..] there will still be some value in knowing how systems work, both to differentiate yourself from other developers career-wise, and as part of effective LLM steering.
the thesis is that investing in your skills outside of LLMs pays dividends whether you decide to apply those skills to LLMs or not, plus spending time bonding with your fellow engineers is good for you too. so I'm sure Zig will be doing great in a few years
>> there will still be some value in knowing how systems work, both to differentiate yourself from other developers career-wise, and as part of effective LLM steering.
That seems like a strawman to as I can't think of anyone making a reasonable argument against. After all we still have C and even Assembly developers out there, despite the many languages-that're-more-convenient that've sprouted since.
Naw, limiting LLMs for an event that's specifically about learning, growing, and collaborating makes a lot of sense. If it ends up dying it won't be because of their stance on LLMs for a conference.
People from ZSF and other maintainers have had a pretty clear stance that, while they don't necessarily like LLMs conceptually, they don't really care about if you will use them for tooling or development of your own projects. The anti-LLM stance has been on things that directly affect development of Zig (communication around issues, feature/pull requests, etc) and now, an event which is meant to be a connection place for Zig developers around the world to show off their projects and talk about other projects, and I'm sure you understand why this is a nice place to have human on human communication be the primarily encouraged method.
None of these really affect the end user of the compiler of making functioning, good tools with the language, with a LLM, if they wish to. Ghostty uses LLMs extensively, Bun was essentially vibe coded even before the Rust port. You might not wish to, ideologically speaking, develop in a language built by people who don't like your method of building things, but it's not a blocker that will turn the language into a "hobby language" (if we are judging hobbyism by lack of AI usage)
No need to worry about manual coder hubris. This piece covers all clanker possibilties/bases.
> And even if you have full confidence that the future of commercial software is strictly hands-off agentic coding, Zig Days are still for people who enjoy the act of programming, even if that were to become just a hobby.
Maybe they’ll even get to enjoy their hobbies for a few days without worrying about getting left in the dust (perfectly fine).
My stance is that it already is like that, now TigerBeetle, Ghosty and Roc are the only major projects using it, and none of them are something that drives adoption of new programming languages.
Bun could have been that, if addons were to be written in Zig, that is now gone.
So unless something comes up where "you need to use Zig to play here" becomes a requirement, it will stay as a language where some folks have fun using it, and that's it.
