I would just like to give this a big ol’ +1. I did not like Nix when I started. The ergonomics are hard to get around, but the power is honestly hard to overstate.
Coding agents actually help with a lot of the ergonomic issues. If you have an evaluation issue, it can be annoying to climb into nixpkgs to diagnose it. But codex will do that for you.
I’ve found agenix in particular to be really great addition for agents: secrets you can copy around without risk of accidental disclosure.
In a day I can now deploy Caddy, Authentik, Fleet, Headscale, Stalwart, jmap-webmail, Forgejo, SFTPGo, Immich, Grafana, Jaeger, PostHog, etc. and have them all work together. I can do this on a tiny VPS, and codex can actually estimate and test performance to minimize cost.
The equivalent Kubernetes setup wastes so much on isolation and a scheduler that is overkill for anything small.
Coding agents actually help with a lot of the ergonomic issues. If you have an evaluation issue, it can be annoying to climb into nixpkgs to diagnose it. But codex will do that for you.
I’ve found agenix in particular to be really great addition for agents: secrets you can copy around without risk of accidental disclosure.
In a day I can now deploy Caddy, Authentik, Fleet, Headscale, Stalwart, jmap-webmail, Forgejo, SFTPGo, Immich, Grafana, Jaeger, PostHog, etc. and have them all work together. I can do this on a tiny VPS, and codex can actually estimate and test performance to minimize cost.
The equivalent Kubernetes setup wastes so much on isolation and a scheduler that is overkill for anything small.