Retyping calculus solutions is a great way to remember your LaTeX.

I think the disconnect here is that you can't only retype the solutions. You have to already sort-of know what's going on and you have to also care to understand the gaps.

So transcription can definitely be helpful when part of a broader, intentional process, while also being insufficient to do much on its own.

And the next logical question to ask is whether there's a better form of intentional behavior that might be more effective.

In which case it would be the engagement with minor details that does the productive work. Retyping is merely a gateway to (sometimes) trigger the engagement.

The solution in TFA feels like an on-ramp to cargo culting somehow; observing that manual typing and good results often go together, but then thinking that it's the typing that directly causes the good results rather than the thought process that accompanied the typing.

There's a much better article hiding inside the current one that's titled "Prevent cognitive debt by understanding deeply the code that your LLM spits out", but that sounds like hard work and would probably not be very popular. It's much better for audience engagement to provide a simple solution that anyone can do and does not require a lot of deep thought like "manually retype everything the LLM generated", even if it doesn't actually work.

It is far, far less effective than deriving the solution yourself. Don't take my word for it:

> If you absolutely cannot do it then go home and think but for heavens sakes don't look it up in a book till you give up. Looking it up in a book is giving up. > > Paul Halmos (https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~adutta/blog/quotations-powerful...)