dotfiles/CLAUDE.md

dotfiles-nixos

One flake that builds every machine the user owns. The domain model (Host, Module, Skeleton, Auto-loader, Enable convention, overlays) lives in .claude/CONTEXT.md; the current deliverable's spec is .claude/spec/laptop-mvi.md.

Conventions

• Write comments only where they earn their place, and keep them concise. Assume the reader can read code: comment the "why", not the "what", and explain "what" only when it is genuinely non-obvious. A comment must be self-contained to its file — accurate to a reader looking at that file alone. Do not write about history ("used to be X", "now moved here") or future state, about how a value is consumed elsewhere, or to justify the choice against alternatives; state the positive reason a thing exists, keeping any real stakes as a present-tense consequence. The only permitted cross-file mention is a bare pointer explaining why something is absent here (e.g. "disko derives fileSystems; none declared here"), never narrating what the other file or tool does. Do not use the domain model's capitalized terms (Host, Module, Skeleton, Auto-loader, Enable convention) as glossary references; describe things in plain language, using "host"/"module" only as ordinary lowercase nouns. Never reference agent-facing state (anything under .claude/ or CLAUDE.md). A file-top header is one concise purpose line, added only where the filename or path does not already say it — never a feature inventory of the code below. For a placeholder, say so plainly plus any actionable present-tense directive ("Placeholder: regenerate with nixos-generate-config on the target machine"), never "placeholder for ". Option description/mkEnableOption strings are user-facing documentation rather than comments, so they may describe behaviour more fully — but the self-contained rule and the bans on glossary terms and agent-state references still apply.
• Start each sentence of a comment on its own line, as with Markdown prose. A sentence needing more than one line is first a prompt to ask whether it should be two sentences. Only when it genuinely cannot be split does it wrap, and then it wraps normally at the right margin. Never break a line early at a comma or clause boundary to make it read as a unit. Never use a semicolon, in a comment or in authored prose. Recast as two sentences instead. Only reformat comments you are actually writing or changing.
• Comments posted to Gitea (pull requests, issues, reviews) go out under the operator's account, so sign every one to make clear the author is the agent, not the operator. End the comment with a — Claude sign-off. (A dedicated bot account may replace this later; until then, the sign-off is the only marker.)
• Commit messages follow Conventional Commits, specified in docs/conventional-commits.md. Scope is the module or host the change belongs to (fish, nvim, neogaia), omitted for repo-wide changes. Keep messages free of Gitea-specific references: this repository is mirrored to GitHub, where issue and pull-request numbers resolve to unrelated things.

Gotchas

• This repo is developed on neogaia, which now runs the NixOS it builds. Flakes and the chaotic substituter come from this flake's own nix.settings, so no NIX_CONFIG export or per-command --extra-experimental-features is needed, and building a toplevel with boot.kernelPackages = linuxPackages_cachyos fetches the kernel from nyx-cache rather than compiling it. Both were true only while the machine still ran CachyOS against a distro Nix daemon.
• The substituters a nix build fetches from are the daemon's (/etc/nix/nix.conf), not the nix.settings of the config being built — those only govern the built system. The two coincide here because the dev host runs this flake; they diverge on any machine that does not.
• Git identity is not declared in the flake — there is no programs.git — so it must be set by hand before the first commit on a fresh machine. The July 2026 reimage confirmed this: it wiped the hand-written ~/.gitconfig, and the next commit failed with Author identity unknown, auto-detecting alexion@neogaia.(none). It now lives in this checkout's .git/config, which reaches no other machine and does not survive the next reimage either; history uses alexion <contact@alexion.dev>.
• The primary build/verify seam for any Host is nix flake check, which builds checks.x86_64-linux.<host> (the system toplevel); cheap targeted checks use nix eval .#nixosConfigurations.<host>.config....
• A flake only sees git-tracked files, so a new file that has not been git added is invisible to evaluation even though it exists on disk. The failure names the path and reads as if the file were missing: error: Path 'secrets/shared.yaml' does not exist in Git repository. Staging is enough; the file need not be committed.
• chaotic-nyx must not follow our nixpkgs, and its packages are built against chaotic's own pinned nixpkgs (its overlay defaults to onTopOf = "flake-nixpkgs", the cache-friendly path). That is what lets the nyx-cache.chaotic.cx binary cache hit instead of compiling the CachyOS kernel from source; the tradeoff is that chaotic packages do not see our unstable/stable overlays.
• The remote is self-hosted Gitea (git.alexion.dev), and the intended CLI is gitea-axi rather than tea. gitea-axi resolves the repository from the origin remote and takes credentials from the axi tea login, so both are implicit inside a checkout. No forge CLI is installed on the NixOS build. No gitea-axi, no tea, no gh on PATH — the flake names gitea-axi only as the claude-code module's SessionStart hook command and never packages it, so that hook invokes a binary that is not there. Credentials, however, do exist: ~/.config/tea/config.yml holds a token-bearing login named alexion (not axi), so pull requests can be opened with nix run nixpkgs#tea -- pr create --login alexion --repo alexion/dotfiles --base main --head <branch> .... The --repo flag is required on that path, since tea resolves origin only for a login whose SSH host matches. The same token reads PR discussion, which tea itself does poorly: tea pr <n> --comments prints only the body, and -f comments returns no comments field at all. Use the API instead, taking the token from .logins[] | select(.name=="alexion") | .token. Review comments are not at /issues/<n>/comments — that endpoint holds only top-level discussion and is usually empty. Inline comments need two calls: /pulls/<n>/reviews for the review ids, then /pulls/<n>/reviews/<id>/comments for the bodies, whose path and diff_hunk fields say what each one is attached to. A review row with an empty body is the normal shape when the operator left only inline comments.
• SSH host keys (ssh_host_<type>_key, served by the daemon from /etc/ssh or a secret) are not user authentication keys (~/.ssh/id_ed25519, offered to a remote server). The ssh_host_ prefix is OpenSSH's own name for the former, and the root@<host> trailing field in a .pub is a free-text comment stamped by ssh-keygen at generation time, not a claim about which account uses the key. On this machine the two are provably distinct: the daemon presents SHA256:2ysuBX0+Z6GbdCTujz5JHX6rqnJzIyWhYNrxdhhGwEM, while pushes to git.alexion.dev authenticate with SHA256:nEhHwtHDnLlsuFxyfp+cETgHUZ8xDMxaPVmYM5vuCkA. Renaming host keys after user keys, or vice versa, is therefore always wrong.
• ~/.claude/skills is generated by home-manager with recursive = true, so the directories are real and writable but every leaf file is a read-only symlink into the store. Editing a skill in place fails; its source is modules/claude-code/skills/<name>/ here, applied by a rebuild. Creating a new file under ~/.claude/skills/ succeeds silently and is the trap — it stays outside the repo and reaches no other machine. Copying out of that tree needs cp -rL plus chmod -R u+w: a plain cp -r copies the symlinks, putting store paths into the destination, and dereferenced files keep the store's read-only mode.
• home-manager.users.<user>.home.file is keyed by absolute path, not by a path relative to the home directory. Evaluating home.file.".claude/CLAUDE.md" fails with "does not provide attribute"; the working key is home.file."/home/alexion/.claude/CLAUDE.md". List the real keys with nix eval --json .#nixosConfigurations.<host>.config.home-manager.users.<user>.home.file --apply builtins.attrNames rather than guessing one. A key's .source is the input file, whose store path differs from the deployed symlink's target (home-manager copies it to a hm_-prefixed path) even though the contents match.
• nixpkgs vimPlugins.nord-nvim is shaunsingh/nord.nvim (no require("nord").setup()); the config wants gbprod/nord.nvim, which is packaged as vimPlugins.gbprod-nord.
• nixpkgs vimPlugins.nvim-treesitter tracks the rewritten main branch: there is no require("nvim-treesitter.configs").setup{ensure_installed,highlight,indent}. Under nixvim, use plugins.treesitter with highlight.enable/indent.enable and grammarPackages = with config.programs.nixvim.plugins.treesitter.package.builtGrammars; [ ... ] — the module's own package.builtGrammars, not pkgs.vimPlugins.nvim-treesitter.* (whose query files can mismatch). The module targets the main branch and enables features via neovim-native APIs (vim.treesitter.start(), require'nvim-treesitter'.indentexpr()).
• Neovim is configured via nixvim (flake input nixvim, consumed as inputs.nixvim.homeModules.nixvim added to home-manager.sharedModules, config under home-manager.users.<user>.programs.nixvim). nixvim.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs" is set; nixvim then emits a benign eval warning that its pinned nixpkgs differs from the followed one — builds and runs fine, do not "fix" it by dropping the follows.
• To reference the nixvim-built package's own attrs (e.g. treesitter builtGrammars) inside our NixOS module, give home-manager.users.<user> the module-function form (hm: { programs.nixvim = { ... hm.config.programs.nixvim... }; }), since the outer config is the NixOS config, not the home-manager one.
• The agent's Bash sandbox blocks sudo and swallows it into a bare exit 1 with no stderr, which looks identical to the command itself failing. Re-run with the sandbox disabled to see the real error (sudo: a password is required) before diagnosing anything else. Separately, nixos-generate-config --show-hardware-config needs root on this machine even just to print: unprivileged it dies at Failed to retrieve subvolume info for /, because the root filesystem is btrfs.
• Sudo's credential cache is keyed per user rather than per terminal (timestamp_type=global, 60-minute window, declared by the claude-code module), so an authentication made in one terminal counts for commands the agent runs. Warming it with sudo -v through the agent's own shell — including the ! prefix — never works: that shell has no controlling terminal, and sudo reports a terminal is required to read the password. It has to be a separate terminal. A PreToolUse hook refuses privileged commands while the cache is cold, so a cold cache announces itself instead of stalling; a failure without that message is the sandbox, not the cache.
• An mkOption of a list or attribute-set type is not mandatory the way a scalar one is. Those types carry an emptyValue, so an option declared with no default and never set evaluates to [ ] or { } instead of failing with "option used but not defined". A declaration that is genuinely required cannot be expressed by omitting the default — it needs an assertion, or a default chosen so that the silent case is the safe one. This bites hardest where the empty value is itself dangerous, such as a list of authorized SSH keys, where it means a machine nobody can reach.
• home-manager.users.<user> cannot be assigned twice at the same level in one module: home-manager.users.${user}.home.packages alongside home-manager.users.${user}.programs.x fails with error: dynamic attribute 'alexion' already defined. The interpolated key makes it a dynamic attribute, which nix will not merge the way it merges static paths. Nest both under a single home-manager.users.${user} = { ... }.
• Verifying a nixvim change headless: programs.nixvim.build.package's wrapper has no -u, so running $OUT/bin/nvim loads the caller's ~/.config/nvim (the dev host's real config), not the built config — silently. To exercise the built config, launch with -u "$(nix build --no-link --print-out-paths .#…programs.nixvim.build.initFile)" and a scratch HOME/XDG_CONFIG_HOME. conceallevel is window-local: set it with opt_local/vim.wo, never vim.bo[buf] (which errors).