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by okso 96 days ago
LLMs are getting very good at packaging software using Nix.
2 comments

Then you're committing to maintaining a package for that software.

Like all LLM boosters, you've ignored the fact that the largest time sink in many kinds of software is not initial development, but perpetual maintenance.

It's not materially any different from maintaining lines in a Dockerfile.
It is mateirially different compared to "maintaining" the line 'RUN apt-get -y install foobar'
Is it though? If the way that I’m going to edit those files is by typing the same natural language command into Claude code, and the edit operation to maintain it takes 20 seconds instead of 10, to me that seems pretty materially the same
Yes, it is
How so?
This. I wouldn't have touched Nix when you needed someone who was really good at Nix to keep it working, but agents make it viable to use in a number of place.