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Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
101–110 of 308 posts
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#102The unreasonable effectiveness of the most popular "programming" language used by the most people on Earth ever that has been careful crafted by extremely dedicated people for decades and that is use to communicate by, to and from the most people that ever existed (because yes, most "apps", on mobile at least but even more and more on desktop are just HTML pages too). Is it really unreasonably effective?
The phrase "unreasonable effectiveness" is used here in the context of AI. Where "we put a whole bunch of markup characters in the context" not messing up the output significantly could be considered unexpected. The actual performance impact is unknowable, given the difficulty of measuring LLM performance. And whomever pays for your tokens won't be pleased either.
While it has been used in the context of HTML before, it's a bit of a "meme" as several papers used that phrase. Much like the "X is all you need" snowclone.
The HTML version dates from 2021 (https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...) when client side rendering and web apps were still their peak.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
We 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.
You have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.
People have been authoring html by hand for a long time before the specialization to Frontend dev even existed...
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#104My 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’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.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
We 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.
Templated though, not manually writing it out for every blog post say. I think GP means it just has more friction as a writing format than markdown for example.
No, literally manually typing out HTML tags and everything. Many of us did it so much things like Emmet (https://emmet.io/) were invented and used so we could hammer out full HTML documents even faster.
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.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.
Most front end devs can’t get HTML right either.
Modern 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.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#107Mmm....His position of "stopped using markdown altogether for almost everything" strikes me as overstated and selfpromotional. The 2-4x higher generation cost is non-trivial when you're operating under rate limits, and Git versioning friction is a real problem for your work in big and complex repos. I use the rule "HTML for deliverables, Markdown for infrastructure" and it seems more defensible than HTML maximalism.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#108My 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…
It 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.
Re: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML
#109HTML+Tailwind is the only format where "looks roughly correct" and "is structurally correct" have the same probability. Every other output format needs a renderer to find out which one you got.