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Your title is verbatim how Nix made me feel when I first started years ago. It does so many small things in a pure format that it was hard to immediately come up with the "key ROI" the larger industry expected. Did it just speed up dev envs? Did it just make my builds faster? Back then, a lot of folks barely cared or understood the impact of the deterministic and reproducible foundation using Nix sets. I used to hear a lot of "but that's a day 100 issue", "docker/(insert other tool) solved all of this already". "less afraid" was the easiest way to put it :) Disclosure, fully Nix pilled Ron here from flox.dev and the NixOS foundation.

Loving this. Honestly I keep encouraging folks to just TRY native Nix for dev environments. So easy to set up and get value on day 1 that you'd be shocked. Also models/LLMs have made lightyear strides in the last few months to help with everything around it. We've been building up Nix based skill systems into our Flox skill and it's been super meaningful both on adoption and when we need to scale it up. (disclaimer I do Flox.dev which is Nix based and we do cool Nix stuff)

For anyone reading this and jumping to a broader conclusion: the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying. It does mean that this particular structure was not sustainable, very important contributors burnt out and we need to do better, faster. We need to continue learning from this and continue building a stronger ecosystem that prioritizes the contributors who are the only reason any of this is possible.

Personally, I'm sorry and grateful. Sorry that it ended in core folks being burnt out. Grateful since they did some of the most amazing work, more than anyone can imagine two people doing.

Sharing something I'm personally excited about that's made possible with a lot of Nix/NixOS (nixpkgs) in the background by the Flox eng team. Was initially built for devX but is having a lot of pull for establishing agent infra!

We've been working quite a bit on bringing in Nix/Nixpkg/Nixos based architecture into the space of bringing in determinism to the baseline infrastructure of our AI stacks. This also leans into the conversation around sovereign AI and how Nix is letting us own more of that stack.

Asking this with a bias since I work on Nixos.org and Flox.dev - How is the team thinking about the infra layers underneath these models? Any priority or reason to imbed determinism/reproducibility at the bottom of the stack?

What's the best practice right now for setting these up? We've been primarily using Nix/Flox to set up the models pretty quickly and at least with minimized amount of commands(biased Nix/Floxer) here and found it useful

A small note of amazement from Nix/Flox person here. Incredible to see this release and congrats! Mike, you're an allstar for so many years of contributions!

I.e. is this overhyped?

I feel we should definitely be digging way beyond the SBOM... but also wondering if the forecasting in the general ecosystem is on point or not.

Ron from Flox here. We recently wrote this piece on how Nix can address the emerging CVE remediation problem. We are curious to hear any feedback on our approach.