I admit I don’t enjoy writing Markdown. It doesn’t come natural to me. Just like I don’t find myself comfortable working with a CLI and always prefer a GUI, it seems impossible to fool my brains into thinking “you WANT to style your text with a markup language and not UI controls”.

And yet I find myself repeatedly asking the question “why doesn’t this app just support Markdown?” Not necessarily as the authoring experience for content creation. I’m talking about the ability to export/copy content from the app and have it pasted in a Markdown compliant way into another app.

Most of the time, this is because of LLMs. The rise of machines that are able to understand human language in its raw format that us humans use in writing and reading has led to a new use case that’s unlike that of traditional APIs. It could be described as “Copy, Paste & Run”. The act of just taking whatever stuff you’re working on and throwing it at a language model. Trusting that the smart machine will figure it out. Working based on vibes rather than rules.

This creates a whole new kind of consumer for the data we’ve been working with in apps like MS Word or OneNote before. The traditional GUI canvas they give to users for creating, editing, and viewing content is just one thing. Making it simple for AI tools to consume is a rising need that I found to have an impact on how I choose the tools and formats for my data these days.

The reason Microsoft has been so dominant in information worker tooling for decades is because of how broadly the world in general supported them. People were familiar with the apps. Apps from other vendors were familiar with the file formats. You could trust that things worked well enough when you created a Word doc and someone or something out there would later on need to interact it. Perhaps it was even you, the author, but with a new PC.