To me, "autocomplete" seems like it describes the purpose of a system more than how it functions, and these agents clearly aren't designed to autocomplete text to make typing on a phone keyboard a bit faster.

I feel like people compare it to "autocomplete" because autocomplete seems like a trivial, small, mundane thing, and they're trying to make the LLMs feel less impressive. It's a rhetorical trick that is very overused at this point.

it kind of 'just works' if someone already wrote the nix code to do what you want it to do and put it in nixpkgs and you manage to find it and figure out how to use it. but if that isn't the case, good luck. i once spent almost a week trying to get a program to build and run properly under nix that could probably be installed in around 20 seconds on a osx/windows machine.