Engineer Thariq Shihipar is advocating for HTML as a replacement for Markdown in planning and implementation workflows. He claims that richer visual formats lead to better human engagement and ultimately, better products. In an episode of a podcast recorded at Anthropic's Code with Claude event in San Francisco, Shihipar demonstrates how to use HTML artifacts to create interactive plans, build throwaway UIs for specific problems, and maintain living design systems that travel with the codebase.
The techniques he shares include brainstorming in HTML to get visual mockups and interactive demos instead of text lists, building throwaway micro-UIs to edit specific parts of a plan, and creating a living design system in HTML that lives in the repository and travels with every project. Shihipar also emphasizes the importance of trusting AI while giving it constraints, using plans as artifacts for implementation, and adding comments and annotations to HTML plans.
The episode covers several key takeaways, including why 99% of AI-generated tokens should go to planning, interfaces, and communication rather than production code, and how HTML makes specifications more engaging. The tools referenced in the episode include Claude Code, Claude Design, AWS, Figma, and GitHub.
