Comment by mschwaig

If you make a conventional AI agent do packaging and configuration tasks, it has to do one imperative step after the other. While it can forget, it can't really undo the effects of what it already did.

If you purpose-build these tools to work with Nix, in the big picture view how these functional units of composition can affect each other is much more constrained. At the same time within one unit of composition, you can iterate over a whole imperative multi-step process in one go, because you're always rerunning the whole step in a fresh sandbox.

LLMs and Nix work together really well in that way.