I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago). I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the other stuff.
Claude Code, amazingly, knows all that other stuff. I just tell it what I want and it gets 95% of the way there in 1-2 shots.
Not only that, it can figure out the error messages. The biggest pain in the neck with LaTeX is figuring out what went wrong. With Claude, that's not such a big issue.
One of the best things about Typst is that most tasks are very simple. Compared to the reams of Latex BS I was replacing, building my book with Typst is momumentally simpler.
1. Latex is sufficient for all document publishing needs. E.g. converting Latex to HTML is bad to non-existent, while Typst has HTML export.
2. LLMs are sufficient for solving all problems one can encounter.
3. Things that are easier for humans are not also easier for LLMs.
4. New releases of LLMs will not learn more about Typst
At the end of the day I'm not trying to migrate anyone. Use whatever you feel is best. For my use cases I'm convinced Typst is a better option than Latex.
.. because a new language might be better?
But moving forward it’ll be harder to tell if any given new language is better than existing alternatives. LLMs burden their users with an almost insurmountable status quo bias.
Consider the counterfactual of LLMs being available in the 1990s, trained mainly on the world's C code. Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today for new languages' code could not been synthesized as easily or conveniently. It's not just about Typst or typesetting specifically but programming language design in general and that improvements are becoming much harder to push through.
I'm not actually sure that would be a bad thing? All the reasons that immediately come to mind to move away from C have to do with ergonomics and safety, the latter largely being a product of the former IMO. If an LLM can ingest my entire codebase and do 90% of the work to get me to the changes I need doesn't that obviate the majority of the motivation to change languages in the first place?
I say that as someone who uses a tricked-out Vim for my own LaTeX workflow, and VS Code for several programming languages.
Perhaps the hardest part has been relearning the syntax for math notation; Typst has some interesting opinions in this space.