Text is Thought, and Thought is Holy

Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic put out a thought-provoking article recently, where he argues we move from Markdown to HTML for most AI use-cases.

I see his point and agree to a certain level, but I disagree with the proposed solution.

Here's my understanding of his argument:

• Markdown is hard to read and share for long documents
• Plain text doesn't communicate ideas as well as something with formatting, images, and visual hierarchy
• So we should move the primary spec format from Markdown to HTML.

He makes a great point about Markdown being more difficult to share and communicate ideas with, because formatting and visuals can make things super easy to understand.

My problem with the approach is that, by trading editability for readability, we're separating we humans even further from the creation process.

I value Markdown because I value text. And I value text because I see it as one step away from thought.

I believe thinking is the one thing we should be careful not to outsource, and I worry what this idea smuggles in is a major step toward making our creations opaque to humans. Not just AI's creations, but ours as well.

The reason I value Paul Graham so much is because of the idea compression work that goes into writing super clean prose. It's difficult to write clearly because it requires thinking clearly.

Text makes your ideas naked, and I like that.

• What is the problem, exactly?
• What should we do to solve it?
• Why is our solution better than alternatives?

I love the challenge of crystallizing this kind of critical stuff in pure text before any technology is involved.

If we're not writing that text ourselves, and then editing it, it starts to feel a lot like bringing a strong robot to the gym.

I worry that if we vibe-think to AI and have it spit out amazing HTML, we're instantly disconnected from the idea. Like where did the idea go? It started as vibes and got put through a woodchipper and turned into someone else's HTML.

Can I see it in 4 simple bullets? Can I stare at it? Can I grapple with it? Can I tweak it? It's an idea. I need contact with it.

Of course we can ask the AI to summarize its brilliant HTML document into four bullets, but we'll have lost through compression and expansion some percentage of the original.

Maybe I'm being overly emotional here.

I just feel like if you didn't put the hard thinking and writing work into the original idea, and then maintain it in a format that's easy for humans to read and edit, then you have somehow surrendered something Holy to the machines. I say this as a total AI maximalist.

But I get the point he's making, and I think it's super valid.

It's hard to explain or convince people of things with a giant text file. Formatting massively helps. Images massively help. Even an interface or a video or something.

So we're synched on that. I just think it might be better to get the outcome in a different way.

• MARKDOWN: Easy for humans to write, hard for humans to read.
• HTML: Hard for humans to write, easy for humans to read.

Maybe the solution isn't moving the first step to HTML where it becomes more opaque to both agents and humans (plus the versioning issues Thariq talked about).Maybe the solution is something crazy like document pairing: like you have the thought file and you have the presentation file(s).

The proposal is to ask AI to just write HTML, right? Well why not just have a separate but linked file for that? One is for crystal-clear human creation and sync between human and AI. Simplicity, clarity, precision, and human editability.

We don't have to choose. We can (and I personally will) keep our .md or .mdx files as authoritative, but then simply add a post-commit hook that auto-builds a brilliant presentation-optimized HTML file or whatever after every change.

I hate the idea of multiple files, but I think it's far preferable to losing the transparent, editable connection to the idea that you get with text.

Basically I think it's much easier for AI to make an additional, rich and shareable version of our clean and agent-friendly Markdown file than it is for humans to stay connected with ideas when they're blended into opaque HTML.

And I think the human thought-to-text connection is the highest-order bit we need to preserve.

Still thinking it through, however, and massive thanks to Thariq for the push for all of us to evolve on this.