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.
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.
Even after React became popular, people are still manually typing out HTML elements, although they call it "JSX" instead, but in reality it's just HTML.
My first blog on the internet literally was a bunch of .html files, where my post "template" was the first post copy-pasted when you wanted to make a new post. Changing the design involved changing the same thing across all files.
Typing out <p> for every paragraph is annoying, for sure. But a converter that switches out \r\n\r\n for a new paragraph would be a reasonable middle ground IMO.
Both. We manually run HTML just fine back in the day.
I did not go to a front end high school.
CSS, on the other hand...
I'm not and I've used it for years. With Markdown being a thing that has been less common, sure, but that's more of a zeitgeist thing.
No, we've been generating it with templates or authoring templates.
Authoring HTML by hand is a very early 2000s thing to do.
It's usually faster though, so you get to spend more time on thinking.
"No bread? Let them eat cake!"
To me it feels like a worse experience, and they probably feel it too, but it makes sense from an optimization perspective. I've probably learned some shell tricks, but also going blind from watching Claude try dozens of variations of some multi-line chained and piped wall of bash nightmare, instead of just reading a few files.
Also: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...
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.
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.
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
*No!*
I mean, <b>yes!</b>
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.
I’ve done something similar with Figma-like commenting and find myself pulling it into all kinds of personal projects.
I think most of us live somewhere in the middle, using the right tool / output for the job.
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.
1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
2: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
3: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
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.
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.
On a serious note some kind of rich Markdown would definitely help.