[teiferer]

A counter argument would be that all programming languages of the last decades have been plain text based. No other more structured format has ever gained traction even though modern editors could be argued to be able to support that easily. Turns out, it doesn't actually work that way.

[IanCal]

HTML is plain text based at the same level as any programming language I can think of.

[9dev]

But we’re not even dealing with a programming language in any classical sense here. Interacting with an LLM coding system is a multi-mode communication system with on-demand, purpose-generated ephemeral UI. That doesn’t fit any of the established categories, so I think carrying over constraints from them doesn’t make sense either.

[coldtea]

>with on-demand, purpose-generated ephemeral UI

Nope, it's a fixed, coded and shipped UI: the agent TUI.

[9dev]

Even Claude Code can whip up interactive, tabbed, multiple choice questions for example. If you use the superpowers plugin, it'll sometimes spawn a small web server demoing UI concepts or previewing more complex choices using LLM-generated HTML. Claude Code on the web will do even more involved React apps on the fly next to the chat. There's no technical reasons this couldn't get more complex, or vertically integrated with code editors.

I'd definitely call that on-demand, purpose-generated ephemeral UI.

[dkersten]

Most people edit documents in Microsoft word, though, so it didn’t seem too far fetched that LLM content would be edited similarly, especially as more and more non-programmers use it.

[pbhjpbhj]

MS Word uses HTML under the hood, right? (Or some SGML at least.)

[dkersten]

It was less a comment about the format and more a comment about the application used to do the editing.

[thaumasiotes]

There's a visual editor for Windows Forms apps that is well thought of.