Hacker News Reader

> I think the real answer is to get good enough with nix to build a flake quickly for the project you're working with

I just have AI do it. Any of the coding assistants with terminal access can write and test flakes for you.

I tried doing it for awhile but wasn't able to ever get it to work for the main project I was trying to build, which was a VR project called LÖVR. I could have made and submitted a package using one of their appimage releases, but was doing it as an exercise to see how far I could push things.

I also went through a phase where I had AI write a lot of simpler flakes, but they turned out surprisingly different from each other, enough so that I wasn't able to learn a pattern as a base to grok what was happening. At some point I'll try again from first principles, but for some reason the AI flakes hindered more than helping

I don't bother with flakes I just create ephemeral nix shells and a `shell.nix` with the dependencies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com