"We have this system that is so amazing that... it requires a paid subscription to an LLM provider or a $5000 GPU for most people to understand and configure".
Pre-LLM: Nix is "high effort, moderate reward". The cost is: you have to learn a tool which does things apparently completely different to how other tools do things.. you have to put up with a lot of friction, pay all the pain upfront, and the benefit is that may be later it's easier to get the package again.
It's just not a practical trade-off for most developers.
With LLMs, the cost-benefit trade-off changes.
You can use this cloud provider's LLM to get you a good result. You get the benefits, and the cost is 'just' "ask the LLM to do it".
Similarly: it's easier to assess whether produced code does the right thing, than to come up with that code from scratch.
Without LLMs? The inaccessibility also comes from being a niche tool. Not many use it, so not many software projects accommodate it or consider it, and you might have to come up with workarounds yourself.
"We have this system that is so amazing that... it requires a paid subscription to an LLM provider or a $5000 GPU for most people to understand and configure".
When instead Nix could've focused on releasing flakes 10 years ago with probably the same effect. And fix issues like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50040083
Flake stabilisation probably hasn't gotten any easier/more likely by LLMs, but it does make it quicker for people to pickup technology.
Technology sometimes has that odd effect. (And it will apply to different technologies in different contexts at different rates.)
Pre-LLM: Nix is "high effort, moderate reward". The cost is: you have to learn a tool which does things apparently completely different to how other tools do things.. you have to put up with a lot of friction, pay all the pain upfront, and the benefit is that may be later it's easier to get the package again.
It's just not a practical trade-off for most developers.
With LLMs, the cost-benefit trade-off changes.
You can use this cloud provider's LLM to get you a good result. You get the benefits, and the cost is 'just' "ask the LLM to do it".
Similarly: it's easier to assess whether produced code does the right thing, than to come up with that code from scratch.
Without LLMs? The inaccessibility also comes from being a niche tool. Not many use it, so not many software projects accommodate it or consider it, and you might have to come up with workarounds yourself.