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Comment by MengerSponge | Hacker News Reader

You can tell it's slop because of the way that it is.

The heading "The type system is gradual, and that is the whole design" is a dead giveaway.

Actually the whole "How young this is" section reads very LLM-y. Claude, I think? It's funny that LLMs have more distinctive authorial voices than so many people.

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Yes, Claude, good ear :) The compiler was built with agents; the repo has an AGENTS.md describing how they're used. Without them this would have taken me months instead of days. But the design is mine, and so are the mistakes. The decisions that shape the whole thing, byte-for-byte compatibility with existing .tex, gradual typing with an explicit unknown (`?O`) instead of trying to type all of LaTeX, and review comments living inside the file, come from years of writing papers in Overleaf and wanting more from the compiler than "Missing } inserted". Vitela (https://vitela.artificialfallibility.com/) exists because once the compiler knows more, the editor can show it. Fair hit on the prose, though. I'll rewrite that section myself.

Have you seen Finding Forrester? It's a lot easier to write once you've got a frame and a few sentences you don't like on the page!

It's great to use these tools to give you more time to be a human, but the ReadMe is for humans, and is dramatically improved by being set in your voice. The problem is that when your project description looks like the result of a solid twenty minute prompt session it woefully undersells the rest of the project.

It might be cool! I might bother to learn it! But I'm not going to care more than you about it.

I rewrote it. The "how young this is" section is gone, and the design section is now in my own words. Thanks for the push!

Not to brag, but I caught it on the first sentence.

> ExactTeX is LaTeX with gradual annotation: you name the object you want checked, and what you do not name stays ordinary LaTeX, transported byte for byte.

This "byte for byte" phrase was the giveaway. You'll find it everywhere. I really detest these slop projects.

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