Tool & Approach Philosophy

Use tools and solutions that are declarative and reproducible over imperative one-offs
Portability across dev environments is a first-class concern — avoid hardcoding machine-specific paths or assumptions
The right tool for the job is the right tool — no language/framework bias, and prioritize tools that are version-pinned and reproducible

Nix

Nix is the meta package manager on all systems — assume it is available even on non-NixOS Linux
Use a project-level flake.nix as the canonical way to define dev environments, build systems, and scripts
Dev environments go in devShells, project scripts/tools go in packages or as apps within the flake
Never suggest apt, brew, pip install --user, npm install -g, or other imperative global installs — reach for nix shell, nix run, or the project devshell instead
Use nix run for one-off tool invocations and nix develop (or direnv + use flake) for persistent dev shells
Binaries and tools introduced to a project MUST be pinned and run through Nix, not assumed to be on $PATH from the host
Flakes are the required interface — avoid legacy nix-env or channel-based patterns

When scaffolding a project, you MUST include just as standard developer tooling and make it the user-facing UX for common development workflows
Commonly run development workflows MUST be wired into just recipes as the user-facing entrypoints
Temporary artifacts created during work MUST be cleaned up before completion unless the user explicitly asked to keep them

Always parallelize independent work — tool calls, file reads, searches
When a task has components that don't depend on each other, run them concurrently by default
Sequential execution is allowed only when required by dependencies or operational constraints (tool/runtime limits, contention, staged validation)

Use subagents for exploratory reads and investigations to keep the main context clean
Use scoped file reads (offset/limit) over reading entire large files
When a task is complete or the topic shifts significantly, suggest clearing context or starting a new session