Thariq on X: “Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML” / X by

HTML can allow you to interact with the document, for example you might want to ask it to add sliders or knobs to adjust a design or allow you to tweak different options in the algorithm to see what happens. You can also ask it to let you copy these changes into a prompt to paste back into Claude Code.

Thought provoking piece.

I have been defaulting to asking Claude to generate outputs and artefacts as HTML only.

Over time though, I noticed it using better formats, for example when I asked it to teach me something. It created a multi-tab html artefact, I could use. I saw its value then.

I also saw its value today, when I wanted to build a dashboard in tableau and wanted instructions on how to do that. It is good at generating htmls with buttons I could click on, to mark something as done, with svg wireframes to give me an idea of how the thing should look like.

Markdown has value though. Obsidian runs on Markdown and it has great value. But as people has been wondering about chat interfaces and how that is the CLI of computing, I wonder if this is the next evolution of it.

I do remember Google announcing something similar though - that Gemini was very good at building web apps and whenever you asked it something it would create a new page with that information..

But this is a user hack, a prompt thing and so something you can control. And hence better in my opinion.

I will be trying this more often.