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by chombier 428 days ago
What I found hard with Nix is the sheer amount of things I had to get familiar with before it started to really click:

- nix, the command-line tool

- nix, the language

- nixpkgs with the general API/idioms (overriding, overlays)

- individual nixpkgs packages that sometimes deviate from common practices

- flakes (which I haven't properly looked into yet)

The Nix pills series [1] and nixpkgs documentation [2] do help a lot, but that is quite a lot to process.

[1] https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills

[2] https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/
2 comments
angra_mainyu 428 days ago
Controversial, but I found just going through the docs, attempting to write my own flake, throwing it at ChatGPT and asking it to review it and give me feedback was enough to get started.

I never ask it for code, just to review code - keeps me sharp and makes the iteration cycles faster.

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pxc 428 days ago
ChatGPT is generally pretty bad at writing Nix code IME, and has a much greater tendency to hallucinate than when writing code in other languages.

But it's better at advice and review than writing code.

And if you want to ask it about Nixpkgs conventions or the behavior of some Nix codebase, it does much better if you dump the relevant source files in the chat for it to consume.

It's important with Nix to seriously understand what you're doing, so I think the way you've described is the most appropriate way to use an LLM with Nix. Use it to point you to docs, ask it questions about some code and then read the code closely, ask it which docs to read, ask it to point you to example repos on GitHub. If you use it this way it can actually be helpful.

If you have a longer time horizon, interacting with real community members is even better, and of course can also enrich the corpus for LLMs like ChatGPT. Discourse.nixos.org has a lot of smart and helpful people whose insight is more reliable than the advice of an LLM, so it's worth visiting as well.

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woile 428 days ago
they are a lot of things, but it's hard to avoid otherwise. Overall I'm glad it's relatively cohesive how it all works.
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