[jmmv]

I started playing with NixOS recently in a VM and... while I don't have much experience with it yet, it feels _great_ for the many reasons described in the article. I really like configuring a file and knowing that the rest of the system aligns to whatever that file says: no more, no less.

The language is "interesting" and I haven't had to learn it in depth yet. Claude and Codex really make it easier to get started with Nix's weirdness -- but that's unfortunate because I feel I'm not going to learn the "real thing" otherwise. And this difficulty makes me curious about Guix though because, even though I'm not LISP expert either, at least I can read it.

Anyway. I'm just shy to "dig deeper" on NixOS because my servers are FreeBSD and I'm already feeling the temptation to swap them with NixOS, which would feel like a betrayal to these long-lived installations... ;-P

[tombert]

I feel like if you want to learn Nix with some hand-holding, resist the urge to use Claude Code or Codex, but instead just use the chatbot in the browser or something. Ask it questions, explicitly copy and paste in errors as they come up, and manually copy and paste out the generated stuff.

I found that this gives a good compromise of being able to learn Nix relatively well, but still having a "tutor" to help when things get tricky. I'm reasonably ok at Nix now, and can generally figure out what I need to do without AI assistance, but I'm glad I had ChatGPT when I was getting started with it.