| 11 Sep 2025 |
 Preston | As a suggestion, I would probably integrate some form of the NixOS wiki or some other tutorial or learning tool in your generator. Most people in this room and the NixOS community in general are probably going to have similar opinions on GenAI with regards to nix; and most people are not trying to discourage you either, we just haven’t seen good nix code come from GenAI due to the scope of NixOS catering to a wide population of users | 13:46:27 |
 K900 | I have never seen good code come from GenAI full stop | 13:46:51 |
| Preston | I seen a good Hello World lol | 13:47:18 |
 Austin Horstman | Sure you have, you just don't know it because it wasn't bad. | 13:47:22 |
| K900 | I'm sure I've seen good code that was initially generated by an LLM, but then audited and cleaned up by a human | 13:48:04 |
| K900 | I'm talking specifically about raw, "vibe coded", if you will, LLM output | 13:48:16 |
| Preston | In reply to @prestonh:matrix.org
As a suggestion, I would probably integrate some form of the NixOS wiki or some other tutorial or learning tool in your generator. Most people in this room and the NixOS community in general are probably going to have similar opinions on GenAI with regards to nix; and most people are not trying to discourage you either, we just haven’t seen good nix code come from GenAI due to the scope of NixOS catering to a wide population of users I’d also like to say that I definitely don’t speak for literally everyone. This is mainly my opinion of what I’ve seen generally | 13:48:21 |
 redbeardymcgee | AI: I'm the idiot so you can feel smart correcting me, even though you're also wrong. | 13:49:21 |
| redbeardymcgee | when you sense AI, run away | 13:49:53 |
 toonn | Yep, I disagree about discouraging them, for example. IMO, please don't LLM anything. It's a waste of resources. | 13:49:58 |
 @x12:matrix.org | Wow, you really roasted me here.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to write programs like this. I kind of understand how they’re supposed to work and what they should do, which is why I’m using AI.
The idea for the app came from the fact that a few days ago I installed NixOS myself, and, well… long story short, I had a hard time figuring out the config.
That’s where the idea came from — a quick app that can more or less show me what I can do with it and in what format.
It’s not a finished project for the public, more like a template with an idea — a little helper for getting into the world of NixOS for new users 🙂 | 13:57:37 |
| K900 | You may be interested in https://github.com/snowfallorg/nixos-conf-editor | 13:58:12 |
| K900 | If you're looking for something that does a similar thing, but more correctly | 13:58:22 |
| K900 | There's also https://mynixos.com/ | 13:59:00 |
| @x12:matrix.org | That's exactly what I meant.
We can close the topic now 😆 | 14:00:08 |
| redbeardymcgee | Don't look to AI to solve problems for you. It will just make the problem worse. | 14:02:37 |
| redbeardymcgee | You have to be the expert who can fix every little mistake it makes, in order for AI to produce anything useful. By the time you work all those details out, you could have just written it better and faster yourself. | 14:03:28 |
| redbeardymcgee | AI pooping code out on your screen feels better than the feedback loop of reading & understanding documentation, but it's worse.
| 14:04:20 |
 Ihar Hrachyshka | no. just in the last week I generated 1) a benchmark for something in k8s world that used API I never touched before 2) a c++ app extracting all envvars from darwin process kernel api, one-shotted; I can't produce c++ code without much struggle. Both pieces of code were used and immediately thrown away. It didn't make it worse, I didn't need to be an expert. For (2), I later compared what it produced with the actual code in Lix tree for the same and it was very similar / not worse. | 14:06:59 |
