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0 pointsbwm11d ago0 comments

Yea, I totally get it. The thing is agents change the game. You no longer need to worry about the learning curve or how best to implement.

Just point your agent at a machine0 VM and say "make a machine that does X", then you get code you can use to build on any nix box and you'll always get the same result.

Once you experience this, it's hard to go back to a "traditional" OS, you'll want to nixify everything :)

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astralkraft9d ago· 1 in thread

I could say the same about Atomic distros and reproducible builds. Nix no longer has an exclusivity here. I find Ansible w/ Alma 10 Atomic (there's an rpm-ostree driver, cargo, pipx, etc.) gets the job done with less tokens, and less cognitive load on my team, that already doesn't want to work on configuration. Does Ansible have perfection? No, but neither does posix. Papering over this bump with a perfect abstraction isn't as useful in our imperfect world.

All that being said, I'm glad people like you are pushing Nix forward. Competition here is a good thing.

ikety5d ago

Ansible is a different tool than Nix. It's been specifically designed to fit your exact use case. If ansible works for you and your team, there's no reason to drop it.

I've never had a moment using nix where I've felt "wow I couldn't do this with any other tool". That's not really the benefit of nix. The benefit is the flexibility of the idea and the tooling.

It's a flexible enough platform where I can use one config to manage 5+ computers in my house with various operating systems. I can use it to easily setup all my dependencies for my work projects. I can use it to build my work projects. I can use it to create vms to test those projects on. I can use it to build 3rd party projects without any instruction.

All that required was a few months of pain learning the fundamentals of nix and I've received the rest for free pretty much. It's the epitome of upfront work for long lasting benefit in my opinion.

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