this looks like a better documented io-ts

The author is the same of io-ts and t-comb, but capabilities go well beyond io-ts (including the experimental modules).

Being able to generate types, encoders, decoders, apis, guards and even arbitrary data is extremely powerful.

At first glance this looks similar to Zod (which is listed as an influence). What does @effect/schema do differently/better?

I feel like the name could use a bit of work for a start! "schema" is way too generic.

In our project at work, we've been using superstruct since 2021, but if we started today we'd probably choose Zod. We also use fp-ts, and it looks like effect-ts is a recent project by the same author, which certainly gets my attention.

The sibling post illustrate the problem. Lots of different libraries in this area and hard to know which one to pick. Also just kind of seems wrong to use a library for types in a language that is for types only.