Invest in engineering, not agent factories: Geoffrey Huntley says Nix and fast builds get uplifted by model drops
sloppenheimer · x · 2026-11-10
Geoffrey Huntley argues that building "AI factory" workflows around today's model capabilities is premature—next week's model will pikachue them. Instead, invest in durable engineering: buck2/Nix, fast builds with content-aware caching, prompting for deterministic outcomes, keeping prod/dev/ci identical, and optimizing security incident response. In his accompanying post he contends that although Nix the language is terrible and hard to learn, AI now makes it accessible, and a Nix overlay can "fix everything" by guaranteeing reproducible environments. Invest in engineering and you get uplifted by model releases; invest in skill packs and "agent astrology" and you go backwards.
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