Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

Post by le-mark » Sat, May 09, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

athrowaway3z wrote: post #119

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 struct…

Post by redsocksfan45 » Sat, May 09, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

Post by le-mark » Sat, May 09, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

mritchie712 wrote: post #147

We previously had our ( https://www.definite.app/ ) agent write reports / dashboards in a YAML spec that would get rendered by our frontend framework (i.e. charts and tables). For example, user says "build a report with revenue and orders by month and show 100 most recent orders". The agent would write a spec that would get rendered by our frontend. This runs fast, but we were drowning in feature requests for what th…

Post by momojo » Sat, May 09, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

rsolva wrote: post #59

momojo wrote: post #12

When exploring a new idea or tool, my go to prompt is ``` In a single index.html, no dependencies, sparse styling, create an app that ``` 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!"

This is the way! It is incredible how far you get with a single HTML-file, containing styles and JS, when building dashboards, small apps and other utilities that can interact with an API or otherwise fetch data from somwhere. I just drop it on my personal ~ folder on the shared server at work and voilà, everyone can check it out and use it immediately!

Post by insane_dreamer » Sat, May 09, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC