Planning with AI Agents: Markdown vs... HTML?

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hello guys, over the weekend this tweet exploded on the internet in the AI coding community by Tariq from Cloud Code who is telling that our beloved markdown is not the way anymore. So, we've been learning to write Markdown instructions for months now and some people have markdown engineer even in their Twitter bio and suddenly we're back to HTML. And the main question was how HTML may be more effective than Markdown because it's more kilobytes.

[00:00:31]It's literally using more tokens. So, how can it be more effective? And that's why some people started replying or quoting Tariq kind of almost trolling that he tweeted it because management asked him to force people to use more tokens. This is one retweet. Another one they waited for more compute to post this. As you may know, cloud code and anthropic made a deal with SpaceX to receive more compute to handle the traffic and the outages issues. So yeah, in this video I will compare markdown versus HTML for the same prompt to generate the plan and also I will explain why many people misinterpret what Tariq is trying to say or maybe he's kind of bad at phrasing and explaining what he wants to say and I will show you a few examples that HTML idea is not new at all. It's been around for months now and some people do successfully use it but for what use cases? Let me show you. So first if you read the actual article big long article on Twitter actually what it comes down to is the example HTML well HTML document by Tariq with examples of what HTML files are more reasonable and more effective than markdown. And the goal is to have a document that human will actually read actually read instead of skimming. And I think the markdown problem is actually real. For example, if you see this HTML presenting to you the options of which way to go with your code, it's quite easy to read, isn't it?

[00:02:08]And then make a decision because it provides pros and cons. It provides code examples. So imagine something like that in markdown or in fact, let's try it out. So here I have a fresh new demo project very small one and I realized along the way that I forgot to use Laravel starter kit which means I don't have login and register functionality and I will ask clot code to plan to provide three possible options to add o into this laravel application. But before I prompt let's check the usage.

[00:02:38]So I'm on $20 plan of anthropic and currently have 36% 5h hour usage and 62% weekly usage. Now let's prompt. And this is my prompt. I dictated it with my whisper flow. So this sounds messy and human language, natural language, but at the end I emphasize this. Give three options. Provide pros and cons and code snippets and your recommendation. Now if we launch that, let's see what cloud code comes up with with Opus model. I think it's on medium thinking level. And we have the result quickly in 20 seconds. And we have recommendation. And then we need to scroll up to actually read all those options with code snippet for some reason provided only in one of the options. And this is probably two simple examples. So it's relatively easy to read. But in more complex scenarios, you can imagine that this markdown or this list of options may be quite complex. Let's check the usage now. And we have 2% of current session used on that prompt. And now let's prompt to make HTML from that. So this is my prompt. Provide the answer on HTML page.

[00:03:47]Nothing really too fancy. And by the way here you can see visual explainer skill.

[00:03:53]You may not have that skill and then cloud code would build HTML on its own but a special skill which I did cover already on this channel. So back in February. So that's why I told that HTML thing is not new. Visual explainer skill not official. It's not from Cloud Code or Anthropic, but it has 8,000 stars already on GitHub, and I still have that on my system, and it produces something like this. And does it take time? Yes.

[00:04:21]And does it cost tokens? Yes. But look what has opened in our browser, the HTML version of the same answer. So now you see three code snippets or terminal commands in this case side by side visually also explained pros and cons and to me visually it's much easier to read than scroll in markdown here because for example while reading this code snippet I don't see the other snippets or other options on the same screen and it's not even about markdown it's just text based information it's vertical so you have to scroll up and down and in this case HTML page side by side is genuinely more user friendly.

[00:05:06]Now let's check the usage of cloud code.

[00:05:08]How much did it actually cost usage and we have 43%.

[00:05:14]So we used 5% of usage of 5hour limit on $20 plan. Is it a lot? It might be considered like a lot for producing just HTML page. So people are right in pointing out that Tariq is suggesting to use more tokens, but the question is what do you use it for? So what Tariq is emphasizing on his HTML example page is this part. I think if you have some kind of plan or tradeoffs in not a convenient way, you are more likely to skim the document to go over it too quickly to glance over it instead of actually reading. you're more likely to miss some details maybe and then if you're making quite important decision or if you're in plan mode for example this authentication mechanism may be a foundation for the whole project ahead so the cost of wrong decision here is pretty huge may be pretty huge of course this is artificial example in my case but you probably get the idea and then if you go through that document of Tariq most of the documents Most of the HTMLs are about human choice, visually explaining the things. For example, visual design directions. Of course, it's not markdownable, so to speak.

[00:06:34]Implementation plan, this could be in markdown and this could be the result of plan mode session, but generally in plan mode, it doesn't produce data flow chart. It doesn't produce markups. So I guess even the prompt to make this decision choice would imply that it's not just markdown. Also other HTML examples are basically about visualizing the information or the decision like for example visualizing the information about pull request. What this pull request does write up for reviewer. So this is easier to read than just GitHub probably in many cases. So it even has table of contents all clickable with JavaScript probably or just HTML anchors design decision is obviously not markdown prototyping illustrations diagrams decks. So this is kind of obvious that it should not be in markdown. So I guess many people trolling Tariq for being wrong about effectiveness haven't even read the examples of what it is effective for.

[00:07:40]And I think Tariq went too spicy stating that he's stopped writing markdown files for almost everything. That is not entirely true. I mean it may be true but that tweet should have stated that he means plan mode and for human decision case. And also another example of such HTML comes from claude code team themselves from entropics. So this is another video in February about playgrounds. So they had released in February. This is another tweet by the same Tariq making playgrounds using cloud code with the idea to generate not just HTML dynamic HTML with JavaScript to make decisions based on like choosing the values then something is refreshing on the same website and then you make a decision about colors about choices about like chart flow and stuff like that. So this is even more dynamic and yes it costs even more tokens but again to make the correct decision about fundamental things in the project it may make sense to use more tokens because you're at the crossroad and I will link that video in the description below so you can see my example of how I used playgrounds. So yeah, with this video I wanted to kind of spice down the tweet and HTML is the new markdown is too spicy. Take stop writing markdown files is not accurate at all. But HTML is indeed more effective. If you want to make some important decision and you can ask cloud code with or without any skills to provide HTML for you and then you visually go over it and then proceed with the cloud code session based on one of the chosen options. What do you guys think? Do you often ask AI agent not necessarily cloud code to generate some HTML or some visual explanation for you to make a decision or how does it work for you in plan mode? What is your workflow? Let's share our experience and discuss in the comments below.