Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML • Hacker News Board

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#111

Post by dheera » Sat, May 09, 2026, 11:48 AM UTC

tmhrtly wrote: post #21

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 rep…

HTML is super human readable if you stick to a subset of it.

It's arguable even more readable.

bold italic underline

I can never remember how many stars and ticks correspond to what in markdown.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#112

Post by IanCal » Sat, May 09, 2026, 11:56 AM UTC

teiferer wrote: post #53

9dev wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

A 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.

HTML is plain text based at the same level as any programming language I can think of.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#113

Post by IanCal » Sat, May 09, 2026, 11:57 AM UTC

sheept wrote: post #55

4k0hz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is HTML really that much worse to edit than MD?

Markdown 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

It’s a bit easier yeah but there’s not much in it.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#114

Post by eddyg » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC

AndrewSwift wrote: post #76

alsetmusic wrote: post #10

> I’ve started preferring HTML as an output format instead of Markdown and increasingly see this being used by others on the Claude Code team, this is why. 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 w…

Which Quick Look extension? I've been looking for a good one.

https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins lists some good ones. (I still use Peek.)

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#115

Post by IanCal » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:01 PM UTC

ryandsilva wrote: post #25

A couple of tradeoffs I don't see mentioned here for HTML vs MD: - HTML is significantly less token-efficient - Difficult to provide precise feedback on plans HTML, much easier to do this in MD. 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…

It’s a little less efficient but there’s not a huge difference unless lots of it is structural or visual.

What’s harder than with markdown about precise feedback? You can have ids, sections and more with tags.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#116

Post by IanCal » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:02 PM UTC

GreenJacketBoy wrote: post #58

The problem I have with this shift is that you basically give up on writing documentation by hand, not only for you, but for everybody who might want to edit your documentation. 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…

Writing and editing html by hand is very simple, it can be just a few basic tags.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#117

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:07 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#118

Post by thih9 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:07 PM UTC

To each their own but my immediate reaction is that I find text and markdown clearer.

In html I don’t like the extra ornaments (borders, bullets, badges, etc).

To be fair, I usually ask for concise and specific information, where this kind of response style would be a distraction.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#119

Post by athrowaway3z » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:11 PM UTC

tmhrtly wrote: post #21

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 rep…

I 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.

Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

#120

Post by sverhagen » Sat, May 09, 2026, 12:20 PM UTC

GreenJacketBoy wrote: post #58

The problem I have with this shift is that you basically give up on writing documentation by hand, not only for you, but for everybody who might want to edit your documentation. 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…

>I tend to not actually read more than a 100-line markdown file

I tend to not actually read more than 100-lines of anything anymore. I've long referred to myself as "the Google generation": only being able to read the summaries in a search result. That, and the typical doomscrolling model of social media have affected my attention span. Reading anything more substantial takes real effort now.