I was teaching a few concepts around agentic programming today, and at some point it struck me how weird and nice it is that markdown is having arguably its biggest moment yet. In a world of large language models, it turns out that plain-text enhanced with formatting and machine-readable frontmatter is a pretty useful thing to have knocking about.
I’ve been writing with markdown for years. The most important things I write, I write in markdown. I’m writing in markdown right now. There have been many times that I’ve considered using some other stack for this blog or for my private notes, but I keep coming back to markdown. There’s something so satisfying about a file vs. a database.
Markdown syntax has even snuck into other places, now. You’ll find some of it in WhatsApp and Instagram, and there are extended dialects like GitHub Flavored Markdown that give you even more to play with. John Gruber has done many great things, but bringing markdown into existence I think is still one of the best things he gifted to the world.
Who could have known that all these years later it would be the language spoken by these otherworldly tools. The language that we use to speak back, from agents.md to skills.md to the countless other places that it shows up. I have markdown files piled high from years of writing, ready now to serve some new purpose in a new world. Peculiar.