alt Hacker NewsEven if the help isn't great, good coding agents can try out the cli for a few minutes and write up a skill, or read the sources or online docs and write up a skill. That takes the spot of the --help if needed. I found that I can spare quite a lot of time, I don't have to type up how to use it, if there is available info about it on the web, in man pages, in help pages, or the source is available, it can figure it out. I've had Claude download the sources of ffmpeg and blender to obtain deeper understanding of certain things that aren't much documented. Recent LLMs are great at quickly finding where a feature is implemented, how it works based on the code, testing the hypothesis, writing it up so it's not lost, and moving on with the work with much more grounding and fewer guessing and assumptions.
Using the source code to ask questions about poorly documented features in projects you have no experience is my favourite thing that LLMs make possible (of course you could do this before but it would take way, way more time). There are so many little annoyances that I’ve been able to patch and, thanks to NixOS, have the patched software permanently available to me.
In fact NixOS + LLMs feels like the full promise of open source software is finally available to me. Everything is within reach. If you don’t like something, patch it out. If you want to change a default, patch that in.
No need to know the language, the weird build process, or the custom tooling. Idea to working binary in minutes. I love it so much.