I would have never become a power user of Linux were I used LLM to do the installation of Gentoo once upon a time. :( So do you guys not know much about the distro you are using, or how does this work? I honestly thought your comment was sarcasm, but apparently it is not.
The things to know about the OS are high level things. The rest of its idiosyncrasies you learn just in time through daily exposure like anything else.
Coming from Ansible with hand-written config templates this was honestly a friction point for me - I felt like NixOS is trying to actively hide what it's actually going to configure. It's gotten better now that I read some nixpkg service sources but from time to time I still feel the urge to just directly manage my systemd units, sshd configs and whatnot. Like, sure it simplifies the setup but at the same time also puts another abstraction between me and the software I'm using.
You always have the option to do your own custom thing like use nix config to manage /etc/iptables.rules.
NixOS does you one thing better by giving you the option to configure things without caring about the underlying implementation, like whether the firewall uses iptables or nftables or something else.
I agree with the many levels of abstraction, but at the same time, directly managing systemd units is also so much easier with Nix then any other distro I've tried.
Nothing about this changes with Nix nor AI agents.
You can read documentation on an as-needed basis or to your heart's content.
The point is that the majority of the day to day changes I make to my desktop environment aren't so critical that I need to do more than read an AI agent's proposed changes to my config and accept them when they look reasonable.
And I don't think looking up the exact config options to NixOS' networking system does anything to increase my knowledge of the OS. It's just a triviality.
You hate that I couldn't remember whether nix has array delimiters on the spot?
Jeez, tough crowd.
Though it also kinda represents this pride over triviality that some people latch on to in the AI world which is odd since it's also only a mistake a human would make. Had I run my hand-written comment through a proofreading clanker, I would have spared you the negative emotional reaction.
In the pre-AI world, you would have probably not been so harsh since it's understandable that someone make that mistake with such an idiosyncratic language like nix that almost nobody writes full-time. Yet in the AI world, you demand more from humans.
> [..] only a mistake a human would make. Had I run my hand-written comment through a proofreading clanker [..]
That's true, and I should've been less rude in my previous comment. Sorry.
(Though note `nix eval` would've sufficed, no need for the probabilistic kind of clanker)
> Yet in the AI world, you demand more from humans.
But this isn't true. In my opinion `learning >> depending on an LLM` and my gripe is that it seems like the former is being displaced by the latter. In the pre-AI world I would've known that the person making the mistake wasn't making it because they outsourced their skill.
So I'm not, in fact, demanding anything more than in the pre-AI world.
The other poster is being a jerk, but your point doesn’t really refute theirs: if you can’t even be bothered to check for an array delimiter, instead passing that on to an AI, how will you ever learn?
People are being more demanding of humans because humans are taking knowledge and learning for granted. All this abstraction has a cost, and the cost is you.
Things are falling out of your memory all the time as a function of how often or seldom you do something, how trivial or superficial the information is, and how minor the difference between other tools you use regularly.
Despite many years of experience, I still sometimes get this wrong in Python or its equivalent in the other languages I regularly switch between:
from math import sqrt as s
import sqrt as s from math
import sqrt from sqrt as s
The difference here is that, because I admitted to using AI, I don't get the grace of making the most trivial mistake in a forum comment.
And suddenly we pretend that had I just written it by hand a few more times, I would never err again in forum comments, despite making similar errors this week in languages I've used to write millions of lines of code across decades.
Well, there's layers. When I started using nixOS I read through the guide and wiki but I also used LLM assistance to help create a stable starting point. Then over time I've incrementally added new things to my configuration through a mix of LLM assistance and reading online material.
I think the initial migration towards nixOS is the hardest point, since it requires learning a bunch of new things all at once in order to get the system into a usable state that matches your expectations and preferences. The key benefit of using an LLM is that it makes it really easy to get your system into a useful initial state, and then you can safely learn and experiment incrementally with a mix of tools.
When I started off I didn't understand everything, but at this point I feel I have a very good understanding of everything in my configuration file.
I'm glad that I'm not the only one. I don't want to move from "Microsoft knows best" to "Claude knows best but hey, at least you review the output by looking up the not so good documentation".
