I'm overwhelmingly surprised about Claude's ability to know the package.

But the cut-off point in model / harness quality before it hallucinates everything but the general Nix syntax is staggeringly low.

There’s a NixOS MCP, it’s pretty good

My usual solution is to just clone whatever I need. e.g. in this case just clone nixpkgs and put in your instructions that it should do a git pull to make sure it's up to date and then refer to that whenever doing anything with nix. Agents are really good at using grep to explore repos even for something completely internal. Then you don't need any config or special tools. e.g. for work I just have a directory with like 30 repos cloned and my base AGENTS file I use says to refer to either them or live system state for ground truth. I basically never encounter hallucinations.

Same goes for the harness itself. Want to know how Codex works or whether it can be configured in some way? Clone it and ask it to look at itself.