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Comment by lupsasca | Hacker News Reader

I am very sympathetic to your point of view, but let me offer another perspective. First off, you can already vibe-write slop papers with AI, even in LaTeX format--tools like Prism are not needed for that. On the other hand, it can really help researchers improve the quality of their papers. I'm someone who collaborates with many students and postdocs. My time is limited and I spend a lot of it on LaTeX drudgery that can and should be automated away, so I'm excited for Prism to save time on writing, proofreading, making TikZ diagrams, grabbing references, etc.

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This is what I see, you need more of an active, accomplished helper at the keyboard.

If I can't have that, the next best thing is a helper while I'm at the keyboard my damn self.

>Why LaTeX is the bottleneck: scientists spend hours aligning diagrams, formatting equations, and managing references—time that should go to actual science, not typesetting

This is supposed to be only a temporary situation until people recover from the cutbacks of the 1970's, and a more comprehensive number of scientists once again have their own secretary.

Looks like the engineers at Crixet were tired of waiting.

What the heck is the point of a reference you never read?

By "grabbing references" I meant queries of the type "add paper [bla] to the bibliography" -- that seems useful to me!

Focusing in on "grabbing references", it's as easy as drag-and-drop if you use Zotero. It can copy/paste references in BibTeX format. You can even customize it through the BetterBibTeX extension.

If you're not a Zotero user, I can't recommend it enough.

I have a terrible memory for details, I'll admit an LLM I can just tell "Find that paper by X's group on Method That Does This And That" and finds me the paper is enticing. I say this because I abandoned Zotero once the list of refs became large enough that I could never find anything quickly.

AI generating references seems like a hop away from absolute unverifiable trash.

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