I've been wanting to setup a new home server for a long time and have been held up way too long in weighing different architectures, so I finally used AI assisted exploration to crash-dive into a NixOS prototype deployment to see if a fully declarative approach could tame configuration drift, encryption, containers, and networking in one place. This writeup walks through building an full disk encryption NixOS prototype with Tang-based auto-unlock, Podman quadlets, and nftables — including the rough edges, undocumented workarounds, and what broke along the way. The takeaway is my assessment of where NixOS will be my future platform of choice.