I literally just fixed a couple of nagging config issues that I couldn't be bothered to find in my (admittedly complex) set of NixOS and HM config files by asking Claude to find and fix them.
I had Claude do the grunt work of shifting parts of my config to a new structure I started but didn't have time to fully implement.
Based on examples I provided, I had Claude use specialisations to set up a couple of different WM and DE test environments.
And the thing is that, now that I have everything set up the way I want, I don't really have to DO anything to keep the system running, other than occasionally update (I'm on unstable, so I do that manually).
Could I turn Claude loose on my .config directory, give it access to apt or dnf (etc.), and let it set up a non-NixOS environment for me? Probably, and it would probably work reasonably well, but I wouldn't trust it the way I trust NixOS.
NixOS's greatest weakness historically has been bad/missing docs, especially docs of the "I have X how do I do Y?" nature. This led to a situation where thousands of users asked those questions on forums and received answers covering a spectrum of possible paths forward. The other path was to spend a bunch of time trolling through module sources to find the options you need and understand what they were going to do and how they would interact with each other.
Anyway, it turns out this is a perfect setup for an AI bot to step in: it's got all those forum posts to learn from and it's endlessly patient when it comes to just figuring everything out from the source code.
I was already happy with my big ball of nix config for various servers, but claude does shave off a bunch of rough edges and make it more pleasant to interact with. I also resolved a couple nagging issues that had been around for a while.
It does tend to hallucinate but thats the great thing about nix... if it builds its probably right!
I had Claude do the grunt work of shifting parts of my config to a new structure I started but didn't have time to fully implement.
Based on examples I provided, I had Claude use specialisations to set up a couple of different WM and DE test environments.
And the thing is that, now that I have everything set up the way I want, I don't really have to DO anything to keep the system running, other than occasionally update (I'm on unstable, so I do that manually).
Could I turn Claude loose on my .config directory, give it access to apt or dnf (etc.), and let it set up a non-NixOS environment for me? Probably, and it would probably work reasonably well, but I wouldn't trust it the way I trust NixOS.