Thank you, you're welcome! I think those tools are interesting, but a crutch / tape over difficulties that Nix presents. I think that tools that try to hide a bad experience with another layer often presents more problems in surprising ways that sometimes leaves users with no option but to undo all their hard work and start over. We did a similar experiment last year with Riff, but haven't paid it much attention because of the layering problem. Our focus is making Nix and flakes themselves the best tool for the job.

I hope there will be, but I'm not really sure. I think the future of Nix is in smaller, focused flakes being shared and exchanged. People dunk on projects like Rust and Node for having infinity dependencies, but it is that way because those ecosystems have rich library ecosystems that are worth using. I see the same thing happening in Nix.