6 ms·
My concern here is that by gravitating to HTML you lose the ability for a human (you!) to easily co-author the document with the LLM. If it’s just an explainer
by tmhrtly 5mo ago
My concern here is that by gravitating to HTML you lose the ability for a human (you!) to easily co-author the document with the LLM. If it’s just an explainer for your consumption, that’s not a concern - but if it’s a spec sheet for something more complex, I deeply value being able to dive in and edit what is produced for me. With a HTML doc it is much harder to do that than with MD.
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.
- bigfudge 5mo ago[dead]
- 4k0hz 5mo agoIs HTML really that much worse to edit than MD?
- psychoslave 5mo agoLet’s see… *No!* I mean, <b>yes!</b> It depends what we mean I guess, isn’t Markdown supposed to allow [hx]ml tags anyway if user need them? Then it’s more about asking the LLM to generate Markdown with this in consideration, and privilege rendering the output of reports in the preferred browser after relevant rendering.
- abirch 5mo ago1. I believe many applications that use markdown allow html. Others don't due to security/rendering issues. 2. One of the limiting factors of LLM is context. An html table takes up way more tokens than a markdown table. Especially if it's a WYSIWYG editor that has all kinds of css and <span> tags just for fun.
- afavour 5mo ago> An html table takes up way more tokens than a markdown table That might be the case today but there’s no reason for it to always be true. They are different representations of the same thing, an LLM could (arguably should!) store an internal representation that uses fewer tokens.
- sheept 5mo agoMarkdown is essentially just syntactic sugar for HTML[0], so yes it was made to be easier to edit than HTML. [0]: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks
- IanCal 5mo agoIt’s a bit easier yeah but there’s not much in it.
- rubslopes 5mo agoYes, I do think it is. HTML made by Claude will, by default, be "sleek, modern", with colorful tables, cards, maybe Tailwind for styling. And, of course it will, if you wanted a barebones HTML, you would just have asked for markdown! So the LLM decided to present some content using 4 cards, and you now want to add new itens. You can't just add new lines of text: you need to copy the whole HTML of the cards. But the LLM used different colors for each card, so now you have the first cards with varying colors and the new cards all the same color as the last card. Now you have to think about colors... etc etc
- voxleone 5mo ago[dead]
- Jakob 5mo agoWe have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.
- laurels-marts 5mo agoYou have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.
- AlecBG 5mo agoJava engineers write lots of HTML in java docs:)
- Tomte 5mo agoYes so far, but it‘s switching heavily towards Markdown.
- austin-cheney 5mo agoMost front end devs can’t get HTML right either.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoModern JS/TS devs probably not, but I wouldn't even call someone a "frontend dev" if you don't know HTML, kind of being a infrastructure engineer and not knowing how any OSes work.
- austin-cheney 5mo agoIt’s not just knowing HTML as in writing a bunch div tags and patting yourself on the back. If you aren’t able to achieve at least 80% WCAG AA compliance you can’t write HTML. Most frontend devs have no idea what any of that means. But then it seems everyone who can write 3 lines of code professionally refers to themselves as an ”engineer”.
- 9dev 5mo agoI suppose that only applies if you constrain yourself to a raw teletypewriter emulator… in any proper coding environment, editing HTML should be absolutely simple - even an embedded WYSIWYG editor would be an option if rich model output is a way we head into.
- teiferer 5mo agoA counter argument would be that all programming languages of the last decades have been plain text based. No other more structured format has ever gained traction even though modern editors could be argued to be able to support that easily. Turns out, it doesn't actually work that way.
- dkersten 5mo agoMost people edit documents in Microsoft word, though, so it didn’t seem too far fetched that LLM content would be edited similarly, especially as more and more non-programmers use it.
- 9dev 5mo agoBut we’re not even dealing with a programming language in any classical sense here. Interacting with an LLM coding system is a multi-mode communication system with on-demand, purpose-generated ephemeral UI. That doesn’t fit any of the established categories, so I think carrying over constraints from them doesn’t make sense either.
- divbzero 5mo agoYes, and you can always embed HTML in Markdown for <script>, <style>, <svg>, and other tags that cannot be coded in Markdown.
- awllau 5mo agoMakes sense for actual devs. For non-devs who'd just edit docs via LLMs anyway (myself), I can't imagine it'd introduce much friction.
- manmal 5mo agoYes that’s the case. And as Anthropic staff, author has an incentive to promote workflows that require an agent to interact with text documents.
- elkoan 5mo agoI've yet to see Anthropic promote any sort of token optimization strategy to its users - they always assume we all have infinite inference. "No bread? Let them eat cake!"
- afro88 5mo agoNah they do. They push Sonnet pretty hard rather than Opus for most tasks. Also: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-use/advisor-tool https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...
- eterm 5mo agoI've noticed that's changed over the past month or so. Claude-code used to happily pipe build commands straight into context, but recently it's been running them as background tasks that pipe to file, and it'll search and do partial reads on the output instead. It also gives tips on reducing context size when you run /context . Presumably they are actually starting to feel the pinch on inference costs themselves with what still feels like a fairly generous max plan.
- oefrha 5mo agoAnd it seems to use head, tail etc. more than it used to, even when unnecessary, which, combined with the recent(?) tendency of more chaining and as you said, piping to temp files and the like, totally screwed up claude code’s auto approval system for me (by auto approval I mean the system to decide which commands can be run without permission prompt, based on the permissions.allow setting among other things, not to be confused with a specific new approval mode called “auto” that burns more tokens to decide whether the command is safe). I had to write my own auto approval system and plug it in as a hook.
- 5mo ago
- archpulse 5mo ago[flagged]
- edoloughlin 5mo agoI’ve started using HTML for reports recently. But I always use a markdown file as an intermediate and tell the LLM to generate a fancier version of it with SVG for graphs/pictures based on tables in the markdown.
- renticulous 5mo agoOne idea that could be useful for products like Browser Use and Stagehand is instead of using videos of the session, they can use HTML slideshows to show the step-by-step progress of the session. Single file HTMl can be downloaded and shared and annotated as well. I hope someone from those companies are here and will take this advice. I am not advocating for replacing the video sessions but also have the HTML Slideshow as another session artifact.
- adam_patarino 5mo agoIt highlights the extremes the anthropic team adopts LLMs in their workflow. I think most of us live somewhere in the middle, using the right tool / output for the job.
- dheera 5mo agoHTML is super human readable if you stick to a subset of it. It's arguable even more readable. <b>bold</b> <i>italic</i> <u>underline</u> I can never remember how many stars and ticks correspond to what in markdown.
- abdusco 5mo agoMost editors format and highlight markdown syntax as bold, italic or strike through, but I have never seen the same thing for html. They only highlight the html-specific parts leaving the content unstyled.
- tdeck 5mo agoOddly enoght those are now called the "bring attention to" element [1], the "idiomatic text" lement [2], and the "unarticulated annotation" element. 1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/b https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... 2: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/i https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... 3: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/u https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
- athrowaway3z 5mo agoI actually think there is a second level to this. Yes HTML will get you most anywhere, but I found that letting the LLM define its own language is also unreasonably effective. Currently working on a dumb little mobile game with isometric view and sound: - told codex to write a tool that lets its place blocks in a prepared three.js document and have chromium dev tools take a screenshot. It made up a little JSON structure that defines blocks / colors and some other effects and it outputs 2.5d tilesets. - told it to create a uv python script that would let it define sounds and music, and it made a yaml format that lets it create noises. We completely shot past the svg pelican test. Codex has created both perfectly adequate prototype art of soldiers/knights/priests as well as a prototype soundtrack.
- fredwilliams 5mo ago[flagged]
- kschiffer 5mo agoTypical HN condescending bitterness at it again. Thank you for this very constructive feedback.
- le-mark 5mo agoThis sounds very intriguing have you written more about it anywhere we can read?
- bitexploder 5mo agoThey can map things like this. They are amazing translation layers. As long as it is a shape of problem or data they are trained on they can translate. The DSL they made up is shaped like some other data format they know for that latent space. It seems amazing, and it is, but it is also a core feature of how LLMs work. The problem is it works until it doesn’t. Fuzzy can only get you so far before it decoheres without rigor.
- BobbyJo 5mo agoLLMs do fantastic when you do the architecting for them. Don't let them make system decisions, and you'll have a great time.
- radicalbyte 5mo agoSorry but what? HTML's really simple, I've been using it for 30 years now. Pretty much everything you need to know to do something useful can be learned in an hour. I know that it's 2026 and we've spent the last 15 years hiring people into our field who don't understand the hacker mindset but I didn't think that I'd find them here. They would have been ran out pretty quickly.
- adamtaylor_13 5mo agoWhy is it a problem if co-authoring the document is a touch more difficult? The same could be said of any proprietary file format (which HTML is not!) Designers aren't concerned when they create inside a .psd or .ai file. This feels very similar IMO.
- jedimastert 5mo agoMarkdown supports inline HTML for interactive elements, I think an interesting potential alternative would be an md doc with a known HTML template and simple build (e.g. single line pandoc command).
- sreekanth67 5mo agoyah this should be the way. simpler text in markdown and rich visuals and complex tables in html. coding agents should handle this locally instead of wasting tokens as well.
- ray_v 5mo agoThis is the way - lightweight build process - host it on your private tailnet to consume the document on whichever device you so choose - tablet, phone - also makes it easier to share with co-colaborstors etc. in a more secure way.
- realrocker 5mo agothat’s exactly the core value proposition of the tool I have been working on : https://github.com/livetemplate/tinkerdown https://github.com/livetemplate/tinkerdown
- odiroot 5mo agoWe should ask the agents to output TeX instead. /s On a serious note some kind of rich Markdown would definitely help.
- mohamedkoubaa 5mo agoYou could just do `<fixme>my two cents<fixme/>`
- trollbridge 5mo agoNext up after HTML: someone rediscovers programming languages and comes up with the idea to use them to prompt agents.
- 90minuteAPI 5mo agoMaybe with some kind of plugin for more deterministic output from those languages?
- trollbridge 5mo agoYeah. We could even have some kind of plugin or SKILLS.md file that helps convert from this kind of structured prompt into another even more deterministic, predictable output.
- sevenseacat 5mo agoI have heard people say prompting via JSON is much more deterministic lol
- krapp 5mo agoHTML isn't difficult to read or edit by hand, non-technical people did it for years before the web became commoditized and generating everything with javascript became the standard. It's more awkward than Markdown, yes, but basically simple.
- singpolyma3 5mo agoNot sure what you mean. HTML is designed to be authored and edited by humans
- rattray 5mo agoIt's possible that use of `contenteditable` and ability to save the file could help but that has a lot of limitations/gotchas, so I'm inclined to agree.
- soledades 5mo agoseems like it'd be fairly straightforward to get things setup where text blocks are double click to edit, have drag handles, delete buttons etc, and then you can also use surfingkeys to get vim style navigation. overall i'm seeing a potential here for more human authoring, as you can really multiply the surface of your inputs with deterministic widgets rather than just delegating.
- js8 5mo agoI don't think human coauthoring documents with AI is viable, due to very different costs. It's like with combining hand-written assembler and compiler output. I think ideally there will be some delineation which parts of the document are human-produced and which are AI-produced.
- ar_turnbull 5mo agoIf it’s a collaborative doc, you could make a pretty quick WYSISWYG or markdown editor for inline editing. I’ve done something similar with Figma-like commenting and find myself pulling it into all kinds of personal projects.
- emodendroket 5mo agoTime was everyone took pride in writing HTML in Notepad.
- enraged_camel 5mo agoI started using Thariq’s approach yesterday and it works very well. One thing I noticed is that I’m no longer wary of reading long and complex spec documents. Opus does a great job with web design and uses a combination of clean, modern styling and interactive elements that reduces my cognitive load and improves my ability to understand the details of what it is planning to build.
- burnte 5mo agoHTML is trivial to edit by hand in Notepad or nano.
- onion2k 5mo agoNow 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. It's usually faster though, so you get to spend more time on thinking.
- tqwhite 5mo agoI can edit html. Also, I don't bother with html editing. If it's a doc that needs editing, I just tell Claude to format it for ease of editing and then I just go through and type whatever crap I want to say. Then I ask Claude to clean it up. BUT, I only do this as an easy way of referencing specific ideas and text in notes to instruct Claude. I say, "I have added notes. Read them and adjust the doc accordingly." Or, "Read the notes I added. Turn them into html." It's an insanely productive pattern.
- wek 5mo agoWell said. It is so much better for when the human can see what the LLM has changed and iterate on it with the LLM, making their own changes. Markdown is better for that.