NixOs + Cli Coding Agent
I'm not sure what people think about AI in this sub, it seems to be a contentious subject these days. ...but. Holy crap is this a match made in heaven if you ask me.
I've been experimenting with AI for many years(since gpt2) and Linux as well. And for me the release of chatgpt helped me immensely in using Linux.
I've primarily been using wsl for dev on a windows platform for the last 2-3 years for like hobby dev and some python stuff for work. And instead of the old way of crawling forums, and making the occasional post and then waiting for days praying that someone might know or have the knowledge to help with my issues, I been having a Gemini window open and getting it to help me with terminal commands.
Setting up venvs, fixing cuda, configuring packages, trouble shooting all of my small issues. most of them a few terminal commands a way. The down side off course is that I'm not learning this deeply, but also, my main goal is to use the OS, not learn how to troubleshoot obscure issues.
I make a point of trying to understand what I'm doing but off course a lot of it don't stick, and worse; I forget what I have done to fix stuff and the wsl install gets pretty "messy" in the end. I honestly probably only remember half of what I did to it.
I recently ditched windows completely and tried our Ubuntu and cachy, made dot files, tried to keep i structured , breaking things. All good fun. I've started using cli agents (claude code) instead of chats or ides as well, making me 10x more dangerous and still on the whole relatively clueless.
Enter NixOS and everything just *clicks*. A coding agent sitting in my NixOs home with my Flakes and config files is the most amazing OS experience I ever had. The agent has declarative statment of exactly what my system is. Every fix I do is permanent and stored in my github. My sdd could burn tomorrow and I have me deeply customized os up and running in less than an hour.
Getting good performance out of agents also is these days mostly about context management and the flakes and home manger and the hwconfig is literally *Perfect* context.
People say NixOs is hard, and 2 years ago that was probably true, but with this setup is the easiest to use, configure and troubleshoot and overall just the most solid and flexible OS i have ever used.
This is what Microsoft would hope copilot could be but the will never get there because of the limitations of a proprietary software license.