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.

Markdown only makes sense for us meatbags becuse it's easy for us to edit and version control, but if you're sharing anything where the audience is an agent publicly, HTML must be just as interpretable.

For visualization and animation, I do think HTML can be a very good format.

If LLMs become part of the workflow, this can definitely be useful. But on the other hand, maintaining HTML itself is more annoying than it first appears.

I do something somewhat similar. I download good CodePen examples and store them in a GitHub library so I can reuse them later. It works, but version management becomes quite difficult in practice. So I think there are real tradeoffs.

I even did a workshop with PartyKit cursors, dot voting, reflection comments, and an individual rating at the end.

Oh, and I can add super lightweight analytics so I know who actually reads my things or interacts with my prototypes. ^_^

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/

Though now I'm wondering: why not just add full HTML embedding support as well? I'm talking not just for specific deliverables, but for any of the agent's responses with the user.

``` 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 think the reason stuff like this wasn't done earlier was due to fears about context pollution, but post training has gotten so good that you can do virtually anything in the context window and not have it affect the quality of output.

I hadn't considered HTML and I'm definitely going to try this.

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.

My team kept asking if they could leave comments though, so I built Annotent [1] to help with that, which is also MCP-backed.

1. https://www.annotent.com/

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.