Is it really unreasonably effective?

Arguing for html on a platform with less rich semantics than markdown is just ultimately funny

Now of course you could just reprompt your LLM to change the HTML - but when I already have a clear idea of what I want to say in my head, that’s just another roadblock in the way.

If this pattern becomes more common I suspect human/LLM co-creation will further dwindle in favour of just delegating voice, tone and content choice to the LLM. I was surprised not to see this concern in the blog post’s FAQ.

``` In a single index.html, no dependencies, sparse styling, create an app that <idea> ```

Even before AI, it's how I built small tools, and there's something lovely about being able to email my friends the tool, and tell them "If you want to make a change, toss it to your LLM!"

I worked with a vibe coded app at my last job (and since quit due to it) and because it was a nextjs SPA frontend with a separate API backend, the user facing urls didn't match the backend endpoints. Because AI uses react hooks for everything, state is in-memory, url-based routing isn't a thing unless you design for it. So links aren't free and thus we have no way for users to link to anything other than top-level entry points. LINKS! Especially for internal tools, everything being linkable is vital to collaboration and problem solving.

The need for uniform resource locations and verbs was so well thought out, 30 or 40 some odd years ago.

This is why I read long agent output either by using VIM and MacOS Quicklook (with a markdown extension for rendering) or paste output into MarkEdit (an editor with a preview pane; I think it’s cross platform?). Worst case, have an agent build you a simple local web page that interprets Markdown and renders it. Markdown was invented as a shorthand for web syntax[0]. That’s what it’s for! I bet you spend more tokens and time asking an agent to convert its native markdown to html than any of these.

0. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

For the most parts you just write the regular Markdown headers and paragraphs, embed images, insert tables etc without the need for any HTML tags, making it readable in source form. And if you want to embed an SVG file for example, which the author of the article mentions as one use case, you just embed the SVG directly, and people can render the Markdown in their favorite viewer.

Let's say you're viewing a raw Markdown file in VS Code. You come onto an HTML tag, so you hit Cmd+Shift+V to open the preview and that's it.

Of course for full-fledged web pages with interactive buttons and fully customized styling and all of that, which the author shows in some examples, this is not feasible. But you can get very far when you have mostly text/images/tables and just want to add some extras here and there.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

[2] https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks

Both of these tradeoffs set Anthropic up for success. Using HTML as our medium will increase token usage, and I'd bet they're investing in tools to mark up HTML (part of Claude Design) which will help improve lock-in. Either coincidence or brilliant strategy.

I'm also not convinced that it solves meaningful problems :

> I've found I tend to not actually read more than a 100-line markdown file, and I certainly am not able to get anyone else in my organization to read it. But HTML documents are much easier to read, In my experience, LLMs are not concise when it comes to documentation, so using an easier file format to read because the text is too large sounds to me like solving the wrong problem

> Markdown files are fairly hard to share since most browsers do not render them natively well. Yes, but developers tools (IDE, Git forge) do. What most/some of them don't render natively IS HTML.