A bad Emacs hair day

A few weeks ago I ditched my Doom Emacs config and built my own from scratch. I used NANO Emacs as inspiration. It's been slow going but it's been working pretty well. I've gotten things to a point where I am comfortable with how it all works. Finally, right?

Then suddenly Emacs started crashing every time I launched it. I needed to relaunch a few times before it didn't crash. I could not tie this to any specific change.

Then, exporting PDFs started looking a bit off and I noticed that paragraphs were indenting again, even though I'd been using the same Pandoc template for years. WTF?

I realized I hadn't installed and configured Auctex/LaTeX so maybe that was the culprit. It took me an hour to figure out how to install Auctex using straight.el but I finally managed to get it working. Of course that didn't fix the paragraph problem. I had to go back to using my old built-in org version of the exporter rather than Pandoc, which I'd standardized on last year. And I barely remember how any of that works. LaTeX can be a drag.

I'm still not working, so none of this was time-sensitive or even that important. But what if it was? What if I was in the middle of a work crisis and I had to say, "Hang on, my editor is acting up again." I realize that the intersection of work emergency and Emacs troubles is pretty narrow, perhaps even imaginary, but it has me thinking about the complexity and resiliency of my tools.