Be careful what you make easier

I have found much peace this year going offline to shelter myself from the whiplash of LLM companies jockeying for mindshare by cosplaying as DevRel. Every now and then something gets through the filter bubble — usually because it concerns Markdown, a topic near and dear to my heart and one increasingly in vogue in the age of LLMs as a message bus. The most recent case: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML. The dynamic half of this essay is unimpeachable. What Thariq calls "Custom Editing Interfaces" — throwaway drag-and-drop kanbans, sliders for tuning an animation, side-by-side prompt editors with live preview — I totally agree! The ability to drive down the cost of throw-away snippets and playgrounds to ~zero is one of my favorite uses of his product. But the implicit framing of the essay is "HTML is also strictly better than Markdown for all use cases", and I think he uses the unimpeachable bits to oversell the other half of the argument. The single most important sentence in…