It's not complexity its questionable documentation. Picking up Nix is really hard yet the best we got is a mishmash of unofficial recourses and many of them are out of date and/or focus on the packaging side which is terrible for introduction.

I spent a year dabbling in NixOS, getting a few "toy" setups.

About 6 weeks ago I installed NixOS on a spare laptop and did 100% of the configuration through Claude Codex. Initially I copied "/etc/nixos" off to my existing workstation, until Claude Code bootstrapped it enough to run on the NixOS machine.

I've been running it as my primary workstation for the last 3-4 weeks, and it's been great! 100% configured by Claude Code or Codex CLI.

Configuring a machine via Nix lang is not that fun. Configuring a machine via English is.

And I've thrown some curveballs at this setup. I asked it for gitbutler-cli, which NixOS doesn't/didn't provide, and it was able to package up and build it. It's running Sway. I have my secrets and configs in SOPS+Home Manager.