Recently went from using devcontainers to nix-shell. But in every new project I include instructions for both nix-shell + direnv as well as dev containers, so people can fully ignore nix if they choose.

A form of this which mixes devcontainer and nix might be the holy grail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpBXrsVg83Y&t=941s

Positives

- You lean on the power of dev containers while still using a portable spec

- You get access to nixpkgs which is arguably the most exhaustive package library

- You get the "true reproducibility" of nix over docker

Negatives

- Docker remains the king for ephemeral databases, more convoluted to manage with nix