It sounds like https://github.com/jonringer/nix-template might be helpful to you. You can generate a nix expression to build an autotools package, and you can even pull the package info straight from a public repo. In the case of nix, most C-type things fall under stdenv, so that is the template you would want to use.

I barely write any C, but I've gotten very good at building C/C++ applications over the past couple of weeks by fixing broken derivations ahead of a release.