Author's note
The original version of this article has been retracted. I used an LLM to write the first draft, though this had come after many hours of planning and going through the data and analyses to identify the points to be made, as well as me going through the post line by line, editing into my voice and verifying the wording and scope of the text was accurate. However, many people still felt like the LLM-speak bled through in ways that felt uncomfortable. Given this, I and other members of the Rust Project have decided to retract the post in its entirety.
I stand by the content of the post. As I said, the LLM did not decide the points to be made - those were done well in advance of even beginning to write the blog post. And, admittedly, I did need to make edits to dampen the scope of them (in large part because I couldn't find specific quotes to substantiate them, even though I often "felt" that they were true given what I know as a Rust Project member), but in general I (and the Vision Doc team) defined the content, not an LLM.
Many people thought that the blog post felt "empty", with no "real substance". While I see the point here, this is unfortunately just how the data played out and goal of this effort. The Vision Doc team conducted ~70 interviews (mostly 1:1), which were the basis for the conclusions in this blog post. This is a lot of data, it's hard to fully capture the essence of them in a single blog post. And yet, it is also not enough data to fully capture the nuance of differences across groups of different types. On top of this, it shouldn't be that unexpected the problems we heard about in these interviews are the same problems that we (and many others) mostly already knew existed. The insight these interviews give us is that they allow us to begin to capture for whom which issues are most prominent.
