Make Your AI Show You, Not Just Tell You.

Everyone's saying HTML killed markdown. It didn't, and a birthday present shows where each one belongs.

Every week, my AI builds me a report on how me+machine and Gimbal Podcast are doing. And every week, it hands back a wall of stats I have to reread three times before they mean anything. I'd find the few numbers that actually moved and get on with my day. I figured that was just what a report from an AI looked like.

A birthday card changed my mind.

A few weeks earlier, Devin (the co-author of this newsletter) sent me a link for my birthday. I clicked it and my screen turned into a glowing arcade terminal. SYSTEM ALERT, it announced. Your birthday message has been encrypted by the Birthday Mainframe. To retrieve it, you must complete 10 trials of digital nonsense.

So I did. One trial made me decide which Pokémon would be tastiest as a burger (there is a wrong answer, and the game judges you for it). Another asked for my birthday through a number pad that refused to let me type, only plus and minus buttons, one digit at a time. Ten trials later, the screen erupted in confetti and decrypted the message.

Once I stopped grinning, I realized something. My report and Devin's birthday game came out of the same tool. The difference was the kind of file each of us asked for.

My report came back as markdown. Markdown is the plain, lightly formatted text your AI replies in by default, the stuff with the little headers and bullet points. It's fast, it's light, you can paste it into almost anything, and it's easy to edit. For something you're still working on, or sharing with your AI, it's perfect. What it isn't built for is being looked at. Forty numbers in a row don't get any clearer just because they're in tidy markdown.

Devin's gift was HTML. HTML is what every web page is made of. It's built to be opened and looked at, clicked and used. It takes your AI longer to make, and you can't easily change it by hand. That's the trade for a finished thing, and it's why his birthday card could be a game, and mine could only ever be a paragraph.

Until recently, this choice barely existed. Web pages were too bulky for most AIs to produce comfortably, so plain text was the practical default. That's changed, and it leaves a simple question worth asking every time you produce a file:

Are you going to keep working on the words, or do you just need to see it, use it, or send it?

That's the key distinction: markdown is the draft on your desk, HTML is the finished thing you hand over.

The next week, I asked for my report differently. Give me this as a web page I can look at. Same numbers, same sources. But this time the AI presented the information visually. Each metric had its own little chart, the numbers that had moved were big and up top, and the month's trend was a line I could read in two seconds instead of two minutes.

Nothing about the data changed. I just stopped asking for a draft and started asking for the finished thing. And I only had to build it once. Every week since, I reuse that same page and just feed it the new numbers.

And markdown isn’t dead. The draft of this very issue is markdown. I'm still shoving sentences around, cutting paragraphs, pasting it back to my AI to tighten. You don't frame a rough draft. You frame the thing you're done with. Even Thariq Shihipar at Anthropic, the engineer who kicked off the whole "HTML is the new markdown" conversation, still has his tools export back to markdown when he needs to reuse it. The two pass work back and forth. Neither one replaces the other.

After all ten trials, the Birthday Mainframe finally decrypted Devin's message.

Your AI can hand you something you actually want to open. You just have to ask for it that way. And if a person came to mind while you read this, send it to them.

me+machine