In some ways this makes Jonathan Blow's talk on the Bronze Age Collapse [1] even more poignant.

There was a point where I was working heavily with Nix and increasingly frustrated with its arcane syntax and way of doing things that made a conceptually extremely simple system into one of almost nightmarish complexity; juggling strange default and environment variables and seemingly random command line tooling. Inscrutable documentation that absolutely refused to define very basic concepts but went into insane detail on irrelevant details.

I had numerous ideas around fixing this and contributing to the project, and made some small contributions.

But now... Claude lets me just work around this by figuring out how to make it work. So now I don't understand and don't have to understand. I still look at the generated flakes, etc., when I'm dealing with it, but I'm rapidly losing the motivation to do that if things are just working.

I think this is bad but for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Except to say that having complex tools with simple interfaces (Claude) is risky.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317

I can relate, I was all in on Nix for a while (and it’s still the best Linux IMO) but I’m a bit afraid of the complexity of the whole stack in an extended global economic downturn.

That said: the main fear here probably comes from the enormous size of nixpkgs and the overall cost of the infrastructure. Most individual package definitions should be relatively easy to maintain. So perhaps it isn’t such a big deal, if Nix infra built packages more slowly and reduced the scope of the repo then it could probably cope with having fewer maintainer hours available and less funding.

Still, something about it feels like a Tower of Babel situation. It goes just far enough beyond most people’s understanding to feel like it has fractal complexity. (Although it really isn’t that bad once you’ve spent enough time with it.)

These days I am more interested in simple, self-contained systems like OpenBSD than impressive feats of engineering. I still prefer Nix for most “work stuff”.

But why don't we ask Claude to design a more sane version of Nix? And translate all the Nix files (or whatever they're called) to this user-friendly version?

Or just document things well enough that they are explained and can be re-created from scratch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47300747

c.f.,

http://literateprogramming.com/

Last month I bought a flet.dev subscription (and tokens 3 times over --- the recent update seems to be far more efficient in terms of what one gets for a given token spend?) and have been using it to try to make some small apps for CNC work and I am currently dismantling one based on converting the generated .md documentation and re-writing it with the source code inserted at appropriate places and with added commentary and documentation and links --- I'm confident that when I'm done I'll have a tool which I understand and which if need be, could be re-created w/o AI help, or ported to some different UI toolkit/build system.

Just wanted to chime in and say that is a very good talk, and I recommend people give it the time.