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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
So I'd expect AI to rapidly accelerate Nix adoption. Hopefully, because it is amazing.
Curious: how does Rewind deal with randomness?