drdaeman

@[email protected]
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Just lurking around for news and other gossip.

Contacts: https://zhukov.al/, mailto:[email protected]

This is a personal account that I have for myself, not someone else. So, the views expressed herein blah-blah-blah - the usual disclaimer applies. I may refer to something as "we had this or that" with "we" being the reference to my past or present employers, relatives, acquaintances, imaginary friends or anyone else. This does not make me speak for anyone else but myself, though. Unless otherwise is stated very explicitly.

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Show threaddrdaeman6d ago

I do, but it somehow tends to forget how to do things right now and then - despite having notes in memories system - and starts to do them in its own weird ways.

I’m going to experiment with skills next, or maybe make it build a few helper scripts for itself to quickly get some module source from nixpkgs matching flake.lock without having to think of it all. I’m positive about Claude for nix management, merely saying it’s not something that “just works” for now and reading nix code is still on the human part of the tandem.

This said, to be fair - when it gets the approach right, it excels. I was setting up Ente for photos backup and sharing, and it produced a nice overlay with custom patches for my needs from just “figure out why /shared-albums/ redirects wrong and fix”. Found the module, the package, pulled source, analyzed it, proposed a patch (settings weren’t enough), did it - I only had to test, and only because I haven’t provided it with a browser. Felt amazing.

Show threaddrdaeman6d ago

If only.

Claude Code has to be actively steered, because while it knows some nixpkgs it surely doesn’t know it enough. E.g. it was absolutely incapable of fixing lldap settings after system upgrade from 25.05 to 25.11. It just prodded around blindly, producing meaningless configs instead learning how the module works.

NixOS docs work for me, but I tend to just go for the nixpkgs source instead. Manuals document options but not how those are actually plumbed through, nor what remains behind the scenes like all systemd unit settings). Claude can do this too, but it goes quite weird roundabout ways with a lot of weird `find /nix/store` and `nix eval`s to get to it, slow and token-hungry (and not always accurate).

This said, Claude is very helpful at checking logs and providing a picture of what’s going on - saves ton of time this way. Plus it can speed up iterating on changes after it’s fed enough knowledge (but don’t expect it to do things right, that’s still on you). It has breadth of it, but not the depth, and that shows at almost any non-trivial task.