A new generation of open tools

A delightful new ecosystem of open source productivity tools has taken shape over the last few years. Just in the last year, I’ve found myself using Quarto and Typst extensively for typesetting letters of recommendation, grants, and lecture slides. Separating content from formatting pays dividends in complex documents, and the time to learn these tools was a rewarding investment. I’ve also found aider and Simon Wilson’s LLM, with Llama, extremely useful for learning new syntax and tackling more complex tasks. For instance, I recently rebuilt my CV and lab website to pull in the list of trainees, awards, grants, and papers all from shared YAML files. I am mostly unfamiliar with the Jekyll (Ruby) and Typst syntax, but an LLM could get me 99% of the way there. This means that the upfront cost of these more powerful tools is greatly reduced.