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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Yes but then you're committed to using Nix which doesn't work so well the moment you need some software not packaged by Nix.

Want to throw a requirements.txt in there? No no, why would you even ask that? Meanwhile docker says yeah sure just run pip install, why should I care?

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LLMs are getting very good at packaging software using Nix.

Then you're committing to maintaining a package for that software.

Like all LLM boosters, you've ignored the fact that the largest time sink in many kinds of software is not initial development, but perpetual maintenance.

It's not materially any different from maintaining lines in a Dockerfile.

It is mateirially different compared to "maintaining" the line 'RUN apt-get -y install foobar'

Is it though? If the way that I’m going to edit those files is by typing the same natural language command into Claude code, and the edit operation to maintain it takes 20 seconds instead of 10, to me that seems pretty materially the same

Yes, it is

How so?

This. I wouldn't have touched Nix when you needed someone who was really good at Nix to keep it working, but agents make it viable to use in a number of place.

Packaging for nix is exceptionally easy once you learn it. And once something is packaged, it's solved for all, it's not going to randomly break.

If you care about getting it to work with minimal effort right now more thar about it being sustainable later, then sure.

> Packaging for nix is exceptionally easy once you learn it

Most of the complaints I've seen about Nix about around documentation, so "once you learn it" might be the larger issue.

I don't in ow if I'd say it's "easy". The Python ecosystem in particular is quite hard to get working in a hermetic way (Nix or otherwise). Multiple attempts at getting Python easy to package with Nix have come and gone over the years.

I use software from pretty much every language with Nix. And I package it myself too when needed. Including Python often :)

Packing software with nix is easier than any other system TBH and just seems to be just getting easier.

Nix doesn't make sense if all you're going to use it for is building Docker images. It only makes sense if you're all in in the first place. Then Docker images are free.

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