> Firstly, NixOS is hype

NixOS is more than 20 years old, and virtually all of the things that make it compelling were already present a decade ago. If it's not for you, you'll know after you give it a try. But for those for whom it clicks, it's desirable because it just provides a more enjoyable computing experience. It's not more complicated than that.

> Secondly, "AI ... can .... safely modify my infrastructure", OP is either being a troll or haven't seem how the whole IT world is upside down because of those very same statements.

I do lots of Terraform work and some Nix work with LLM agents at my job. Is it worth it to rewrite a huge amount of whatever infrastructure-as-code your LLM agent generates? Hell yes; they generate way too much code and they make lots of mistakes. Are LLM agents still useful for experimentation via infrastructure-as-code? Also yes.

> Thirdly, "my entire infrastructure is defined in text files", you clearly never heard of Ansible.

I've used Ansible and Puppet at previous jobs. They don't manage state in a comparable way to NixOS. It just ain't the vibe. Domen Kozar wrote a decent blog post about the technical differences a decade ago: https://www.domenkozar.com/2014/03/11/why-puppet-chef-ansibl...

But the real reason is that those technical differences add up to a more pleasant experience for NixOS.

In my earlier days as a NixOS user, I used to get really excited with its design and how cool it is, and the neat technical properties that fall out of that (atomic upgrades! rollbacks! (and no filesystem snapshotting needed!)). I still think those things are awesome. But at the risk of feeding into your impression that "NixOS is hype", I've learned since then that the better pitch is about the subjectivity of using it: it feels good to use because experimentation is extremely cheap, reversible, transparent, and... fun. If you know, you know.

> Secondly, "AI ... can .... safely modify my infrastructure", OP is either being a troll or haven't seem how the whole IT world is upside down because of those very same statements.

That's exactly why you want your infrastructure defined in version controlled files with easy revert when something gets screwed up.

> Thirdly, "my entire infrastructure is defined in text files", you clearly never heard of Ansible.

Ansible is a half-assed version of what nix or even Puppet gets you. Having a version controlled record of which shell commands you ran doesn't help that much when you're still running random uncontrolled shell commands and hoping they do what you want them to.