Absolutely. Running NixOS is a wonderful experience for this reason. NixOS + LLMs make it a breeze to make changes to your system, install and configure new software, and debug issues. Having every aspect of your system defined in a git repo is the perfect fit for agent harnesses.

I'll admit, even with LLMs to help, the Nix language and NixOS did have a rather steep learning curve, because it's quite different from anything I'd experienced before. But after getting the hang of it, I can't imagine going back to a "normal" OS and I'm very happy I put in the time to get over the initial friction.

And to add to that, LLMs start with fresh context on each conversation, so they don't have the understanding of your system that human employees do. Nix lets you naturally encode that understanding in code (and in comments), making sure it never drifts from what the state of the system really is.

I never saw much point in Nix, but if you put it like that... now I want to try.

I set up my homelab server running NixOS entirely using Claude and what would have likely taken me months (if not years) doing it the old fashioned way, got reduced to a few hours of back and forth iteration.

Same for Bazel. It has historically been a very difficult to understand/adopt/rollout tool for a lot of engineering orgs but is going swimmingly for the organization I currently work for.

I got curious one Saturday and ported our monorepo to use Nix for build and test and release. It was a very pleasant process. I had to put aside to tackle more pressing things but I'm all in on using Nix in that capacity.

Agreed, Claude has helped a lot with this project, and being able to iterate without side effects for system configuration changes is really a game changer for agents.

I also love how with the right system prompt they can pull in tooling for what they currently need via a nix shell

I've one-shotted custom distributions built with Nix using AI. It's crazy how well AI and Nix fit together.