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A GUI hides complex code behind menus and drag handles you operate by hand. AI hides the same complexity behind a conversation. Recreating a hand-built InDesign leaflet as a YAML-to-LaTeX pipeline: abandoned in 2025 as beyond the time I could afford: is what made the difference concrete.
Claude’s LaTeX output frequently didn’t compile. The fix wasn’t to prompt better — it was to close the feedback loop. What looked like a reliability problem turned out to be a latency problem.
The same PDF, two different prompts. 'Is this well laid out?' returned vague positivity. 'You’re an experienced typographer, check this before printing’ returned a structured technical review. The before/after register change is a clean, demonstrable lesson.
From a massive archive of 7,000 pages to daily insights, quote retrieval, and AI-powered thematic digests: this project turns static content into a living flow of clarity, focus, and well-being.
1,800 lecture transcripts — 1.8 million words once trapped in Word 97 files — converted to Markdown, scored and tagged by AI, and turned into a searchable discovery platform that also generates print-ready LaTeX anthologies.
Professionally translating hundreds of legacy French Markdown files would have cost a fortune. Instead, a DeepL-then-GPT-4o pipeline with Git diffs as a safety net: keep the good translations file by file, discard the rest, rebuild.
How we transformed unstructured Word 97/2000 files into a decade-long web publication of conferences-using Markdown, Python, and GPT-powered automation for just $30.
