TIL: June 3, 2025 - Weekly Reading: AI, NixOS, and more

AI

• I am disappointed in the AI discourse – Steve Klabnik

  This post from Steve Klabnik has been popular on Bluesky recently. I personally didn’t get a lot out of it though. I am pretty skeptical about AI and it seems that some folks like Steve really get a lot out of it even if it doesn’t get everything right.

  I’ve just found that every time I use it I get really bad results right away and it turns me off. I come back to try it every week or so and I still haven’t found it to be very helpful to what I’m trying to do. Even auto-complete style AI when coding produces results that I’d grade at about a 3/10. I find myself spending more time fixing code that it creates than it would have taken to just write it myself in the first place.

  Perhaps I’m just too used to getting instant search results and finding what I want quickly that I’m not patient enough to go back and forth with an AI to get what I want?

• The Software Engineering Identity Crisis – Annie Vella

  This is an article linked from Steve’s blog post. I found this to be pretty close to how I’ve felt about AI. What I love most about coding is the craft.

  I also love that computers are generally deterministic and produce precise results. AI really takes that away in that it produces results that are not exactly what you asked for but are maybe good enough for most people.

  I recently heard an analogy that human coding is like tending to a garden. I suppose the idea is that with AI, software development will be more like big agriculture where only a few farmers mass produce less nutritious food with less variety but good enough for most use cases, using highly automated expensive machinery. In our case, it’s just a few AI overseer engineers who use expensive AI tools to mass produce generic low-quality software.

NixOS

• How I like to install NixOS (declaratively) – Michael Stapelberg

  Michael describes how he installs NixOS. He describes how to build a NixOS install ISO image which is pretty cool since you can customize and build it pretty easily.

  The other cool takeaway is the use of nixos-anywhere which you can use to declaratively describe the installation you want (disk partitions, initial NixOS configuration, etc.) and automate it over SSH. You just boot up the custom ISO installer image you created and then run nixos-anywhere to complete the installation.

Web Development

• Compiler Explorer and the Promise of URLs That Last Forever – Matt Godbolt

  Matt Godbolt describes how the Compiler Explorer is handling goog.gl links that are now going away. Previously they used goog.gl to create short links which redirect to long URLs that contain Compile Explorer state.

  Rather than the specific of how they are handling this, I think the fact the idea that URLs should last forever can’t be sustained. On a practical level, you can’t expect someone to pay for every domain name forever. It practice URLs often go away even on popular sites.

  Another example is something like Twitter where they are essentially licensing your Tweets to display them on their site. In my case, I don’t want to retain a legal agreement (EULA) with Twitter anymore so I’m planning to delete my account at the end of the year. Those URLs will go away permanently.

  I think we should just accept that URLs are not permanent and instead build a more resilient web that can better handle URLs going away. I’m not sure there is enough interest or motivation to fix it though.