alt Hacker NewsMy 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 reprompt your LLM to change the HTML - but when I already have a clear idea of what I want to say in my head, that’s just another roadblock in the way.
If this pattern becomes more common I suspect human/LLM co-creation will further dwindle in favour of just delegating voice, tone and content choice to the LLM. I was surprised not to see this concern in the blog post’s FAQ.
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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.
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.
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.
Yes that’s the case. And as Anthropic staff, author has an incentive to promote workflows that require an agent to interact with text documents.
HTML is super human readable if you stick to a subset of it.
It's arguable even more readable.
<b>bold</b> <i>italic</i> <u>underline</u>
I can never remember how many stars and ticks correspond to what in markdown.
Makes sense for actual devs. For non-devs who'd just edit docs via LLMs anyway (myself), I can't imagine it'd introduce much friction.
Yes, and you can always embed HTML in Markdown for <script>, <style>, <svg>, and other tags that cannot be coded in Markdown.
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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.