When using Nix to orchestrate a new project, I find myself choosing between these three levels: Just a shell.nix: This is good for starting on, it’s easy to sell to colleagues or project owners you’re not close with or already bought on the idea of Nix. It leaves a very small footprint in terms of lines of code: Every lines in this file is worth its own weight, since it usually just mentions packages to install. That also makes it very tangible. It could look like: