For me, the development experience has been pretty good. Mistakes usually lead to compile errors, or runtime errors with stack traces, rebuilding tends to be fast. On the other hand, the stdlib changes often, and the language is still in development. I am happy that the core team is willing to make changes like this, but it does mean that there’s a bit of churn when a new version comes out.
For backend web development, HTTP, interfacing with libraries, and so on, Zig has a couple of libraries, but the ecosystem is nowhere near as mature as for e.g. Rust. Zig’s equivalent to async runtimes, implementations of std.Io, are also still in their infancy. So, if you want to build web apps today, Rust might serve you better. On the other hand, going with Zig might give you some additional learning experiences.
As for AI bros and corpos, Zig (unfortunately) has quite a few AI bros among its fans. That said, the core team is anti-LLM, as is a good chunk of Zig users.
Memory safety is important, Zig and Rust have different approaches. Zig tries to avoid memory unsafety with optional runtime safety checks and patterns that make them harder to commit and easier to detect. Rust instead has a subset of the language that makes it impossible to cause memory safety bugs, and you can opt into memory unsafety with unsafe. This is why people call Rust memory-safe. These have upsides and downsides, but if you’re doing a lot of memory-unsafe operations, Zig will probably be more fun.
Check out this post for resources: Zig Learning Resources