Using Claude Code means dealing with .md files as a communication vehicle. This is even more acute when building an agentic app. The .md file system is core, as it comprises the way the prompt stack and harnesses are structured and read by agents. But when asking for reports Claude outputs are .md files by default: easy for the agent, tedious and limited for the human reader.
Started using html files as output and improved reading, reducing cognition weariness as you can use charts, diagrams and other visual aids.
Eight kinds of information a single HTML file can carry
Adapted from Thariq Shihipar, “The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML.”
Confirming this I read this from Thariq @trq212, in Claude Blog, May 30th: Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML.
"Instead, I've started preferring HTML as an output format instead of Markdown and increasingly see this pattern being applied by others on the Claude Code team. In this post, I share why and how our team uses HTML to produce richer, more readable Claude Code outputs."
Same content — structured for reading instead of scrolling.Adapted from Thariq Shihipar, “The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML.”
And then, listened to a great podcast from the AI Daily Brief on a linked topic:
"Now, for decades, knowledge workers have packaged thinking into different types of documents, decks, spreadsheets, PDFs, e-mail threads, shared folders, etcetera, whatever the menu of formats available was. Importantly, though, that menu wasn't chosen because the formats were the best way to carry knowledge, necessarily."
An example is this very website, marianofunes.com, which feels more comfortable to share things: Own format, not prepackaged, with multimedia, and evolving. Allows a way to share knowledge, experiences and be a communication channel with its own objectives, built with little effort.