Interestingly, I found operating at this level to have been a necessity if I wanted to fix or write a derivation. Otherwise I would face random errors and be le

Interestingly, I found operating at this level to have been a necessity if I wanted to fix or write a derivation. Otherwise I would face random errors and be left clueless as to what the problem was. I have used Nix on and off for work since 2018. We are using Nix at my current employer for two projects. I agree that if you want to go beyond some simple dev shells, for any realistically complex project you really need Nix Pills-level understanding (+ a good idea of how things work in nixpkgs). It's a two-edged sword - the learning curve is very steep, but once you have that level of understanding, it's a superpower. We heavily use CUDA/ROCm machine learning stacks and Nix makes it much easier to ensure everyone is using the same development environment. Switching between different branches that may have different sets of dependencies/dependency versions always works. Also, it's much easier to stack custom patches on dependencies and caching avoids all the rebuilds.