There is likely a mass of devs that is probably, hmmm, 10x the number of Nix devs from over a year ago, who know exactly what Nix offers and why it is cool, but couldn't be bothered to master it until AI came along and basically "solved the problem".
So I'd expect AI to rapidly accelerate Nix adoption. Hopefully, because it is amazing.
POiNTx 8 hours ago [-]
I've been using nix before you could use AI to write ok code with it and it was a struggle knowing how to configure nix sometimes. Especially when dealing with less popular software which happens from time to time. Still stuck to it as I've felt that once it was working it was pretty amazing. But using Claude with nix is super cool. It's really good and I don't care much about the quality of my nix config at this point, it's just for me and I just want my computer to do what I want it to do and Claude can figure it out most of the time.
unshavedyak 7 hours ago [-]
Heck i used Claude when it sucked just to ask it questions. It was wrong on 50% of the questions back then but it still was easier than randomly searching for the solutions. Claude helped unblock me when i got stuck on obtuse nix errors, foreign compilation issues, etc.
These days it's magical, but it was even a huge boon when it was barely functional. Nix just had a way of leaving me super confused and stranded.
skydhash 7 hours ago [-]
I tried using various configurations tools and to this day, unless it’s needed for a project, my strategy is “don’t bother”. When I use a program for a while, I backup the config somewhere and perhaps write a few notes, but my daily setup vary enough and last enough that I wouldn’t replicate it.
My mac setup hasn’t been replaced since 2021 or something, and it was copied from my old mac. I have a dotfiles git repo, which I drag around and have multiple branches for my daily driver. For temp setup, I just copy files and edit.
0x457 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, even you understand nix and make packages it was still a PITA to use sometimes. If something isn't in nixpkgs or you need a different version, it might be as easy as writting 20 lines of nix, or 2000.
Now you can just send this to agent "port dis <repo link>" and 20 minutes later you get a working package, or 20 working packages what were required for that package to work.
Fixing stuff also easy, just today for some reason my machine wouldn't wake up monitors after sleeping them, a few minutes later claude fixed my configuration. Making QuickShell things with it also easy. For years I've avoide all GUIs for networkmanager and bluetooth on linux because they all looked awful and unusable, now QuickShell things made just for me, exactly the way I wanted.
jeremyjh 8 hours ago [-]
I think that ratio is possible, and certainly I’m counted among those numbers. However, it is not so much the case that I longed to use Nix and agents made it more feasible. What happened is that I wanted an agent to manage my machine’s configuration without giving it much access.
It’s not the only thing that agents have changed for me - I also went back to using neovim and tmux; partly because of how I use remote development servers but also because now I can get my setup working perfectly for me without a lot of hassle.
Open source and code managing all the things has always been a great idea but now it feels crazy to do anything else.
pavo-etc 10 hours ago [-]
This is exactly me and I've fallen in love with nix
pmarreck 5 hours ago [-]
And I understand because it took me TEN YEARS to come around.
I worked with a very forward-thinking functional programmer around 2012 and even back then she was raving about it. And of course, people thought she was a raving lunatic.
I give her credit to this day. It took me having one too many problems caused by NOT using Nix, to cause me to finally dive in.
And there's no going back. Which is what happens with the best technologies.
cedws 10 hours ago [-]
Me too. I’ve known about Nix for a long time but resisted the idea of learning a new language just to manage my system. In retrospect, it would have been worth it, but now I don’t have to.
nine_k 9 hours ago [-]
Nix is amazing in many ways, but its discoverability and transparency are sometimes very poor. Its module system is anything but lean and straightforward.
I say this as a daily user of Nix.
mamcx 9 hours ago [-]
Is mainly the language. Is not just weird like APL , that insanely make sense. is weird.
nine_k 4 hours ago [-]
I don't find Nix the language particularly weird. But pick an arbitrary .nix file, see a bunch of stuff passed to the derivation, and try to find out whence it comes, and what types / attributes are expected there. The only definitely working solution I know is a full-text search over the file tree.
Now compare it even to Haskell, to say nothing about e.g. Typescript.
jeremyjh 8 hours ago [-]
I don’t find it weird compared to other functional languages.
Shish2k 1 hours ago [-]
That's not the compliment that you think it is...
(I say this as somebody who deeply loves the concepts in most functional languages, and loves the concepts in nix, but recognises that the developer-experience of both is about as pleasant as reading somebody else's code-golfed perl)
troupo 2 hours ago [-]
I find this take baffling.
"We have this system that is so amazing that... it requires a paid subscription to an LLM provider or a $5000 GPU for most people to understand and configure".
Flake stabilisation probably hasn't gotten any easier/more likely by LLMs, but it does make it quicker for people to pickup technology.
Technology sometimes has that odd effect. (And it will apply to different technologies in different contexts at different rates.)
p1necone 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah I tried to daily drive Nix at one point pre AI and the ergonomics were just not a good match for me - perhaps I should try it again.
californical 2 hours ago [-]
It really depends on the person, for me I have my own setup script that works on both Mac and Linux, installing all of my core software using whichever method is best for each system, I basically have a csv with columns of “program” “install command Linux” and “install command Mac” and it just works.
Then all of my dotfiles are backed up, with any important other config, in a big gig repo. And all of my documents/photos/etc live on a separate hard drive which gets backed up to the cloud.
All of that to say, with the right setup nix is mostly unnecessary, and honestly the benefit of not using it is that I can wipe my system anytime and restart it with just my usual important programs ready to go. Any mess made along the way gets purged automatically in every fresh install
pmarreck 5 hours ago [-]
I promise you that it will be worth it. Try again.
Nihmie 8 hours ago [-]
Before AI, there was virtually no documentation, and there are so many ways to do any single thing that it makes it brutal to figure out what any given configuration was trying to do.
Is `nix` amazing though? Eh... if it were implemented better, it could be amazing. It's like python virtual environments or `pyproject.toml` for general software. It solves a real problem, but it does so by introducing a possibly even bigger problem.
pmarreck 5 hours ago [-]
No.
it's more like, it definitively solves a problem forever, like nothing else.
It's like when you have immutable data and it permanently solves a class of problems that can result from mutable data.
It's sort of like that.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
I still cannot be bothered, even after reading this article.
fxtentacle 39 minutes ago [-]
"What is this superpower, and why is nobody else using it?"
The "Undo" time-travelling debugger for C/C++ has been around for 20+ years. So I guess the answer is simply that most people chase shiny new things instead of using established, reliable, and, hence, boring tools.
tecoholic 11 hours ago [-]
Seeing Nix these days is such a whiplash experience. We have fully deterministic systems and then we have LLMs. God ;)
bentcorner 11 hours ago [-]
I use an agent to author my nix config - personally I don't have the determination to have picked Nix up entirely on my own so I find it to be a godsend. I can code review config changes and keep it all in git - also makes it easy to pick up the entire config and deploy it on a different machine.
weavie 11 hours ago [-]
Plus if it messes up, you can just roll back.
tyromaniac 10 hours ago [-]
I don't vibe code my config but this is still my favorite part. If I had it working at some point, I can always get my full system back to there
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
Deterministic systems like tracing GCs, JIT compilers, PGO data, machine learning optimising passes that vary their output, depending on program behaviours?
nemo1618 11 hours ago [-]
LLMs can be deterministic too! People just don't bother because the applications of this aren't widely known yet. See https://lukechampine.com/repligraphs
autkuc 10 hours ago [-]
I was just reading Michael Lynch's posts about Sia[0] and I came across this.
Its a very curious project, but don't you end up pinning repligraph usability on model weights? Since you take indeterminism out of the equation, a repligraph's notability is as significant as the producing model's weights, and since there is no dice rolls to be made, the eyeball problem:
> Our blind spots, while not perfectly correlated, have substantial overlap
is entirely replicated. Models that are diffused from one another can have the same blind spots, the same loose statistical reality that exists with humans. This is partially addressed in steering:
> A repligraph proves that a model generated some artifact. It does not prove that the model did a good job, or that the artifact is safe.
but I think the "Peer Review" solution is inadequate, and with some jailbreaking prompts' innocuous looks considered, "the attacker just needs to find one prompt" might be much easier than it appears.
Batching seems to be a huge economic turn off for proprietary model determinism, but I think its entirely viable for consumer models. Trustless evals are brilliant and should've been our reality. Nice project, good luck on your endeavor.
Thank you for the kind words! It's funny how much staying power those blog posts have, haha. Michael has some arcane ability to consistently hit the front page of HN.
True, I expect models to be pretty correlated with each other as well. But you can at least attempt to quantify that correlation in a rigorous way, by running experiments (e.g. by pointing each model at a big project and comparing the sets of bugs they each find).
And yeah, the "double-edged sword" aspect of determinism is definitely the biggest bullet that you have to bite. For me, it's better than the alternative; without determinism, such jailbreaking attacks are still possible, just harder to detect. But I certainly would not want people to go around thinking "it's deterministic, therefore it's safe."
jazzyjackson 10 hours ago [-]
The configuration can be sloppy and vibed, as long as it behaves the same every time nix retains its power :)
saagarjha 10 hours ago [-]
I kind of confused what nix has to do with this considering it seems to basically be reimplementing rr?
Cyph0n 14 hours ago [-]
Dude, this is amazing stuff. Farid really is putting out banger after Nix banger haha. This sounds like a mini/less capable Antithesis runtime, but running on your machine.
Curious: how does Rewind deal with randomness?
iwixon 5 hours ago [-]
I had the exact same thought about Antithesis while reading this. I wonder if this could be used for concurrency bug hunting by setting up preconditions and grinding until failure to capture a bug you’re looking for.
setheron 7 hours ago [-]
The kernel's RNG is seeded from a seed passed at boot.
itsjzt 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
iwannakms 10 hours ago [-]
I'd love to become a Nix user one day. I tried to write a rather complex flake one day; it ended up with Nix (nix command) deleting itself: I immediately lost trust with it.
stuxnet79 7 hours ago [-]
This sounds like a total nightmare. I am very interested in Nix and was strongly considering setting it up on my new travel laptop as a daily driver but stories like these give me pause. I would love to get a more detailed explanation of what happened here. Either way I am past the phase where I'm comfortable or patient enough to beta test software so Debian / Ubuntu it is for me.
chickensong 3 hours ago [-]
Nix daily driver for years here. I don't know what they did to screw up their system like that, but it's unusual IME. Normally you can just reboot and load the previous profile. Even in the absolute worst case, as long as you have your config, you could boot the installer and then load your config and your system comes back exactly as it was. It's definitely not beta software.
FWIW, I used Debian more than anything over decades, and also have little patience when it comes to unstable computers. NixOS is a breath of fresh air and has reinvigorated my love of Linux. I haven't found it less stable than Debian, and also have a higher degree of confidence when making changes. It has its quirks, but ultimately I've found it a joy to use, and I'm never going back to a distro that doesn't have similar capabilities.
If you boot default Debian and apt install a handful of packages from the primary channel, it probably doesn't matter much, but if you enjoy even a modest amount of customizing, NixOS really shines. From one Linux user to another, I encourage you to try it! I have no affiliation, just an old head stoked on Nix.
iwannakms 10 hours ago [-]
Also Nix first tries to find a derivation in a remote cache and sets a very long timeout, so when you have a limited connection (e. g. a corporate limited network setup), it's painful.
tracnar 2 hours ago [-]
I believe the default at least changed so it should be better now!
__MatrixMan__ 11 hours ago [-]
I find myself moving more and more non-build things into nix builds because I don't want to roll my own cache invalidation. Seems like this is yet another reason to do so.
One vCPU on stock KVM, so code in the VM runs on the real CPU. The VM's kernel carries a small Rewind platform: interrupts arrive only when the VM hands control to Rewind, time moves only then, and the timestamp counter and hardware RNG are hidden. A step is one of those handoffs.
3. Keep keyframes
Every quarter second of wall time, Rewind snapshots the machine using KVM's dirty-page [aka Memory Pages that have been written to since the last snapshot] log. Pages go into a content-addressed store (BLAKE3, zstd), so a page shared by keyframes, runs and forks is stored once."
Now, that's some brilliant engineering right there!
While I like the product name "Rewind VM" (and yes, that's what it allows the user to do!), it could just as easily be called "Deterministic VM" and that name would have been wholly appropriate, as well!
Future OS and VM engineers should study Rewind VM. Those are some great engineering ideas there, and determinism, or at least optional determinism, should it be desired, when it is desired -- is the one thing that is completely non-existent in most OS's, most VM's, and most other program runtime environments...
Anyway, a great article on using Rewind VM (never knew about it before this article!) with Nix builds.
troupo 2 hours ago [-]
Are you tooting your own horn?
There could be great ideas in Rewind VM, but the page is littered with Claude-ish which is immediately off-putting.
firemelt 5 hours ago [-]
so this is like redux but for the whole VM?
itsjzt 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
itsjzt 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
itsjzt 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 09:37:29 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
So I'd expect AI to rapidly accelerate Nix adoption. Hopefully, because it is amazing.
These days it's magical, but it was even a huge boon when it was barely functional. Nix just had a way of leaving me super confused and stranded.
My mac setup hasn’t been replaced since 2021 or something, and it was copied from my old mac. I have a dotfiles git repo, which I drag around and have multiple branches for my daily driver. For temp setup, I just copy files and edit.
Now you can just send this to agent "port dis <repo link>" and 20 minutes later you get a working package, or 20 working packages what were required for that package to work.
Fixing stuff also easy, just today for some reason my machine wouldn't wake up monitors after sleeping them, a few minutes later claude fixed my configuration. Making QuickShell things with it also easy. For years I've avoide all GUIs for networkmanager and bluetooth on linux because they all looked awful and unusable, now QuickShell things made just for me, exactly the way I wanted.
It’s not the only thing that agents have changed for me - I also went back to using neovim and tmux; partly because of how I use remote development servers but also because now I can get my setup working perfectly for me without a lot of hassle.
Open source and code managing all the things has always been a great idea but now it feels crazy to do anything else.
I worked with a very forward-thinking functional programmer around 2012 and even back then she was raving about it. And of course, people thought she was a raving lunatic.
I give her credit to this day. It took me having one too many problems caused by NOT using Nix, to cause me to finally dive in.
And there's no going back. Which is what happens with the best technologies.
I say this as a daily user of Nix.
Now compare it even to Haskell, to say nothing about e.g. Typescript.
(I say this as somebody who deeply loves the concepts in most functional languages, and loves the concepts in nix, but recognises that the developer-experience of both is about as pleasant as reading somebody else's code-golfed perl)
"We have this system that is so amazing that... it requires a paid subscription to an LLM provider or a $5000 GPU for most people to understand and configure".
When instead Nix could've focused on releasing flakes 10 years ago with probably the same effect. And fix issues like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50040083
Flake stabilisation probably hasn't gotten any easier/more likely by LLMs, but it does make it quicker for people to pickup technology.
Technology sometimes has that odd effect. (And it will apply to different technologies in different contexts at different rates.)
Then all of my dotfiles are backed up, with any important other config, in a big gig repo. And all of my documents/photos/etc live on a separate hard drive which gets backed up to the cloud.
All of that to say, with the right setup nix is mostly unnecessary, and honestly the benefit of not using it is that I can wipe my system anytime and restart it with just my usual important programs ready to go. Any mess made along the way gets purged automatically in every fresh install
Is `nix` amazing though? Eh... if it were implemented better, it could be amazing. It's like python virtual environments or `pyproject.toml` for general software. It solves a real problem, but it does so by introducing a possibly even bigger problem.
it's more like, it definitively solves a problem forever, like nothing else.
It's like when you have immutable data and it permanently solves a class of problems that can result from mutable data.
It's sort of like that.
The "Undo" time-travelling debugger for C/C++ has been around for 20+ years. So I guess the answer is simply that most people chase shiny new things instead of using established, reliable, and, hence, boring tools.
Its a very curious project, but don't you end up pinning repligraph usability on model weights? Since you take indeterminism out of the equation, a repligraph's notability is as significant as the producing model's weights, and since there is no dice rolls to be made, the eyeball problem:
> Our blind spots, while not perfectly correlated, have substantial overlap
is entirely replicated. Models that are diffused from one another can have the same blind spots, the same loose statistical reality that exists with humans. This is partially addressed in steering:
> A repligraph proves that a model generated some artifact. It does not prove that the model did a good job, or that the artifact is safe.
but I think the "Peer Review" solution is inadequate, and with some jailbreaking prompts' innocuous looks considered, "the attacker just needs to find one prompt" might be much easier than it appears.
Batching seems to be a huge economic turn off for proprietary model determinism, but I think its entirely viable for consumer models. Trustless evals are brilliant and should've been our reality. Nice project, good luck on your endeavor.
[0]: https://mtlynch.io/tags/sia/
True, I expect models to be pretty correlated with each other as well. But you can at least attempt to quantify that correlation in a rigorous way, by running experiments (e.g. by pointing each model at a big project and comparing the sets of bugs they each find).
And yeah, the "double-edged sword" aspect of determinism is definitely the biggest bullet that you have to bite. For me, it's better than the alternative; without determinism, such jailbreaking attacks are still possible, just harder to detect. But I certainly would not want people to go around thinking "it's deterministic, therefore it's safe."
Curious: how does Rewind deal with randomness?
FWIW, I used Debian more than anything over decades, and also have little patience when it comes to unstable computers. NixOS is a breath of fresh air and has reinvigorated my love of Linux. I haven't found it less stable than Debian, and also have a higher degree of confidence when making changes. It has its quirks, but ultimately I've found it a joy to use, and I'm never going back to a distro that doesn't have similar capabilities.
If you boot default Debian and apt install a handful of packages from the primary channel, it probably doesn't matter much, but if you enjoy even a modest amount of customizing, NixOS really shines. From one Linux user to another, I encourage you to try it! I have no affiliation, just an old head stoked on Nix.
https://rewindvm.dev/#how
...of which the following are most important:
2. Run deterministically
One vCPU on stock KVM, so code in the VM runs on the real CPU. The VM's kernel carries a small Rewind platform: interrupts arrive only when the VM hands control to Rewind, time moves only then, and the timestamp counter and hardware RNG are hidden. A step is one of those handoffs.
3. Keep keyframes
Every quarter second of wall time, Rewind snapshots the machine using KVM's dirty-page [aka Memory Pages that have been written to since the last snapshot] log. Pages go into a content-addressed store (BLAKE3, zstd), so a page shared by keyframes, runs and forks is stored once."
Now, that's some brilliant engineering right there!
While I like the product name "Rewind VM" (and yes, that's what it allows the user to do!), it could just as easily be called "Deterministic VM" and that name would have been wholly appropriate, as well!
Future OS and VM engineers should study Rewind VM. Those are some great engineering ideas there, and determinism, or at least optional determinism, should it be desired, when it is desired -- is the one thing that is completely non-existent in most OS's, most VM's, and most other program runtime environments...
Anyway, a great article on using Rewind VM (never knew about it before this article!) with Nix builds.
There could be great ideas in Rewind VM, but the page is littered with Claude-ish which is immediately off-putting.