LaTeX produces the best-set documents in the world and asks an unreasonable price for them. You stop writing to remember whether it is \citep or \citet, and the paragraph you were in the middle of is gone.

Flow Writer removes the trade. You write prose. A model reads what you are writing as you go, works out the structure — that this is a theorem, that this is a figure reference, that these six lines are a table — and generates the LaTeX in the background. You never see the markup unless you want to.

The design problem

The hard part is not generation, it is interruption. An assistant that suggests constantly is worse than no assistant, because writing is the one task where attention is the whole resource.

So the intelligence is ambient by default. Structure detection and formatting happen without asking. Suggestions arrive as gentle nudges you can ignore without dismissing. When you do want help, it is on demand — one keystroke, with the full context of the document behind it.

Practical bits

Templates come from the existing LaTeX ecosystem — thousands of journal and conference classes — or you can write your own. Models are pluggable: run a local GGUF if the document is sensitive, or call Anthropic or OpenAI if it is not.

Flow is not open source yet, and it is still in development. If you write in LaTeX regularly and want to try an early build, write to me.