What is the best dev workflow around nix-shell?

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I don’t use NixOS, but I rely on Nix packages on macOS (Darwin), primarily for the isolated development environments use case. I’ve had pretty good luck using the approach of direnv along with a default.nix file in a project directory. It’s a bit slow when switching into the directory, but otherwise tolerable.

Problem: In some projects, I do not want to have Nix developer tools to be available. This happens when the default OS developer tools or environment are actually the ones that should be used to do some project-specific building, and Nix tools get in the way. What should I do if I do not want Nix-specific Clang or anything else to be prepended to the shell’s default path?

Sample default.nix for reference:

with import <nixpkgs> {};

let
  deps = [
    imagemagick
    mysql57
  ];
in
stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "my-project";
  src = null;
  buildInputs = deps;
  configurePhase = "";
  buildPhase = "";
}
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