It would be neat to define the radicle repo as an input to the flake for a project which used radicle, that way you could add it to the devshell and you'd have pinned the version of radicle to your project such that running "nix flake update" updates that project's version of radicle along with updating its other dependencies (this, among other things, is what having a flake.nix at your repo root makes possible).
A workflow of this sort doesn't need nixpkgs at all, but it does require that the nix flake input handler knows how to fetch from radicle repos. I'll try it a bit later today, but I'm guessing that this will require a change to nix before it works.