alt Hacker NewsThere is likely a mass of devs that is probably, hmmm, 10x the number of Nix devs from over a year ago, who know exactly what Nix offers and why it is cool, but couldn't be bothered to master it until AI came along and basically "solved the problem".
So I'd expect AI to rapidly accelerate Nix adoption. Hopefully, because it is amazing.
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I've been using nix before you could use AI to write ok code with it and it was a struggle knowing how to configure nix sometimes. Especially when dealing with less popular software which happens from time to time. Still stuck to it as I've felt that once it was working it was pretty amazing. But using Claude with nix is super cool. It's really good and I don't care much about the quality of my nix config at this point, it's just for me and I just want my computer to do what I want it to do and Claude can figure it out most of the time.
I think that ratio is possible, and certainly I’m counted among those numbers. However, it is not so much the case that I longed to use Nix and agents made it more feasible. What happened is that I wanted an agent to manage my machine’s configuration without giving it much access.
It’s not the only thing that agents have changed for me - I also went back to using neovim and tmux; partly because of how I use remote development servers but also because now I can get my setup working perfectly for me without a lot of hassle.
Open source and code managing all the things has always been a great idea but now it feels crazy to do anything else.
Nix is amazing in many ways, but its discoverability and transparency are sometimes very poor. Its module system is anything but lean and straightforward.
I say this as a daily user of Nix.
I love the combination.
I use devenv (yet another nix flake dev environments) and opencode.
It is quite a synergy : my nix usage profits from the agent and the agent profits from being able to install just anything.
I even vibecoded a plugin for personal use that runs all bash tool calls through devenv and uses the supplied nix lsp package:
Yeah I tried to daily drive Nix at one point pre AI and the ergonomics were just not a good match for me - perhaps I should try it again.
Before AI, there was virtually no documentation, and there are so many ways to do any single thing that it makes it brutal to figure out what any given configuration was trying to do.
Is `nix` amazing though? Eh... if it were implemented better, it could be amazing. It's like python virtual environments or `pyproject.toml` for general software. It solves a real problem, but it does so by introducing a possibly even bigger problem.
I still cannot be bothered, even after reading this article.
I find this take baffling.
"We have this system that is so amazing that... it requires a paid subscription to an LLM provider or a $5000 GPU for most people to understand and configure".
When instead Nix could've focused on releasing flakes 10 years ago with probably the same effect. And fix issues like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50040083
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Yeah, even you understand nix and make packages it was still a PITA to use sometimes. If something isn't in nixpkgs or you need a different version, it might be as easy as writting 20 lines of nix, or 2000.
Now you can just send this to agent "port dis <repo link>" and 20 minutes later you get a working package, or 20 working packages what were required for that package to work.
Fixing stuff also easy, just today for some reason my machine wouldn't wake up monitors after sleeping them, a few minutes later claude fixed my configuration. Making QuickShell things with it also easy. For years I've avoide all GUIs for networkmanager and bluetooth on linux because they all looked awful and unusable, now QuickShell things made just for me, exactly the way I wanted.