So there are many different commands that compile LaTeX, right? pdflatex, pdftex, latexmk, etc. But they all do that thing where they ask for your input as soon as they encounter an error, right? Well, if you just pipe an empty echo command to them, it notices that stdin has reached end-of-file, and gives up trying to ask the user for input, and just exits on first error. So instead of pdflatex mydocument.tex, you can do echo | pdflatex mydocument.tex and it won’t ask you for input if it sees an error, it’ll just exit. There’s probably a “proper” way to achieve the same behaviour, but I can’t be arsed to read the docs.
Speaking of stupid TeX hacks, at one point I had a script called latex_compile_and_install_packages_until_it_works.sh. It’s essentially a loop that repeatedly tries to compile a document, searches the output of the compiler for anything that looks like a missing package error, and pipes it to sudo tlmgr install. The “fuck it” of package management, arbitrary code execution exploit included!