Category: Thought
Markdown’s Revenge.
Markdown has been quietly sitting in the corner since 2004. You saw it in GitHub READMEs and the occasional piece of documentation, but most people never knew it existed. Now, thanks to AI, Markdown is finally becoming what it always should have been: a text-based PDF. The reason is simple - LLMs love it. And if you’ve ever tried getting a clean .doc file out of one, you already know why.
Tags: Thought.
For over twenty years, Markdown was the sensible option that nobody asked for. Tiny files, readable without special software, editable in literally any text editor, and capable of producing beautifully formatted documents. Yet people kept exchanging bloated Word files with enough hidden formatting to crash a small economy. Apparently typing # Title and **bold text** was considered an unreasonable burden.
The rise of AI changed the game. LLMs don’t think in fonts, margins, or mysterious XML structures buried inside Office documents. They work with text. Markdown gives them structure without the baggage. Headings are obvious, lists are obvious, tables are mostly obvious, and there aren’t seventeen different ways to make something bold. As a result, AI tools generate cleaner Markdown, understand it better, and are far less likely to create a document that explodes when opened on a different computer.
And for Mac users, a small bonus. If you’ve ever wished that pressing Space on a .md file would show a proper preview in Quick Look, there’s a solution. Give Flux Markdown a try (brew install --cask xykong/tap/flux-markdown). It’s a lightweight Quick Look extension that makes Markdown files feel like first-class citizens on macOS. Which, considering the year is 2026 and AI is writing half the internet in Markdown, seems like a reasonable expectation.
Michal
