In some ways this makes Jonathan Blow's talk on the Bronze Age Collapse [1] even more poignant.

There was a point where I was working heavily with Nix and increasingly frustrated with its arcane syntax and way of doing things that made a conceptually extremely simple system into one of almost nightmarish complexity; juggling strange default and environment variables and seemingly random command line tooling. Inscrutable documentation that absolutely refused to define very basic concepts but went into insane detail on irrelevant details.

I had numerous ideas around fixing this and contributing to the project, and made some small contributions.

But now... Claude lets me just work around this by figuring out how to make it work. So now I don't understand and don't have to understand. I still look at the generated flakes, etc., when I'm dealing with it, but I'm rapidly losing the motivation to do that if things are just working.

I think this is bad but for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Except to say that having complex tools with simple interfaces (Claude) is risky.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317

> Constant tinkering around with config files and googling how to fix problems.

i realised long ago this is usually a self-inflicted problem. Some of us (myself included) cannot resist tinkering with something that works reasonably well. When we use Windows its hard to tinker so we leave well along. Linux lets you tinker so we keep trying to reach perfection, and that breaks stuff.

Nix as a concept is amazing, Nix as a language sucks. Combining it with a LLM really is a cheatcode.

Nix still has its share of fiddly problems and esoteric solutions. The difference is, once you (or your LLM) figures it out, you can write down in declarative code and it's solved forever. If it doesn't work, try something else or revert. Fearless system configuration.

I have to agree, I've been using Fedora Bluefin and had some issues and Claude was able to troubleshoot it all. Would have taken me a bunch of time to untangle it myself.

This. Claude Code made NixOS affordable in term of time for us mere mortals.

Yeah I few the same way about cloud services, impossible to humanly-parse AWS articles are finally _useful_.

I'm having kinda the opposite experience, but it's less to do with Linux and more to do with hardware, firmware and manufacturers.

MiniPC network device doesn't have a Linux driver. At all. Had to get a vibe-coded, reverse engineered one. This was a first for me.

NAS (ugreen) was a pain in the ass to install my own OS on (I didn't trust theirs, wanted OpenSUSE, and had to get a reverse engineered LED controller driver so I could display hard drive health)

ASUS Laptop will not sleep properly, and would drain the battery flat in a day or do. Myself & Claude gave up after days of trying various tricks workarounds (up to BIOS hacks). The best I can do is hibernate (after about 5 minutes of sleep) but man, the hacky bullshit required to get there was incredible.

Different laptop sleeps fine but will not, under any circumstances, hibernate. Even though I have all the crazy tricks up my sleeve from the ASUS that won't sleep properly and needs to hibernate. Different hardware, totally different bullshit problems.

And then I recently got an Macbook M1 Max for local LLM hacking and everything just fucking works. I don't like MacOS but the hardware is amazing and the OS just fucking works with it (and I like that).

> Now I just install claude code and tell it what I want my OS to be and how I want it to look.

What does this have to do with Nix, though? If you’re using an LLM to run everything, you don’t even need as many layers of abstractions or tools.

>Now I just install claude code and tell it what I want my OS to be and how I want it to look.

What could possibly go wrong.

yeah, so it's not like Linux is better, but you have now personal assistant to help you, not sure if that's benefit of Linux

I remember trying to remap keys in Linux Mint and install Chinese language keyboard were both major PITA requiring Claude/ChatGPT, while on Windows I could do it without any help in few minutes (the keyboard in seconds)