But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software"

Org natively supports embedded LaTeX, so not sure why this combo would be unholy. You just write Org-formatted markup, reach for LaTeX when you need it, and export it via org-export-dispatch. It also just does what you'd expect if you org-publish to HTML (if you setup a publish project). I pretty much never write anything in plain .tex files anymore as a result of how convenient this is, and have long since forgotten a lot of LaTeX syntax for things Org covers (which is usually all of the prose in a paper). The preview feature also saves a lot of cycles. For sharing an init.el file across OSes, just have your OS-specific expressions conditionally check the system-type variable. For most setups, there should only be a few of these.

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible, and making my own software for everything isn't always compatible with that. So LLMs are good enough to make personal software, but not good enough to maintain them?

Have had the same emacs setup on linux, windows and macos for 15 years. Honestly, it's the best thing in my computing life.

> I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible I honestly can't even relate to what that even means. I'm a programmer - my everyday job is all about changing the behavior of computer systems - local, remote, cloud, embedded, etc. Requirements change, scope fluctuates, problem space evolves - grows and shrinks, accretion is unavoidable. I need to routinely move between language stacks, different data types, formats, CLI and web tools, protocols, paradigms, OSS and proprietary apps. That means I have to constantly adapt, my control plane has to keep up with the flux. Automation is key - you must develop a mentality for that - every little annoyance can be and shall be automated. That is an endless, non-stop transformation of my workflow - continuous maintenance of my tooling. But that is not some toilsome, reactive maintenance. Thinking that you're a programmer that doesn't wan…