Farewell, Markdown. In the AI Era, "Half-Baked Modern" Isn't Needed Anymore

Lately, I’ve finally become convinced of something.

In the AI era, the Markdown layer itself is becoming largely unnecessary.

I’d always had a vague discomfort with it. But before, I figured, “Well, if humans have to write it, I guess there’s no choice.”

Now that AI has reached a practical level, that very premise is starting to crumble.

In AI circles, you’re starting to hear voices calling for a return to HTML and questioning whether Markdown is still needed. So I figure I can finally come out and say it: Markdown is no longer necessary.

Markdown Was Born Out of “Human Convenience”

The reason Markdown took off in the first place is simple.

Writing HTML was a pain.

Writing tags is tedious. You forget closing tags. You need to check the rendered output. For humans writing by hand, it’s heavy.

So the idea was: let’s get by with rough notation like

# Title
- List item

In other words, Markdown was

“a compromise layer to reduce the pain of humans writing HTML.”

This made sense in the old days.

But AI Doesn’t Suffer When Writing HTML

Things are different now.

If you tell an AI:

“Output it as semantic HTML” “Account for accessibility” “Make it responsive”

It produces something passable in an instant.

For AI, the cost of writing

<section>

and the cost of writing

## Heading

are essentially the same.

If anything, HTML — with its clearer structure — can be easier to work with.

In other words, the very reason Markdown existed is starting to disappear.

And Yet, the Vibe That “Markdown Is Modern” Lingers

Here’s the tricky part.

The technical premise has changed, but

“Writing Markdown is modern”

— that culture still remains.

In one past project, the team lead was aggressively pushing Markdown.

Meeting notes in Markdown. Specifications in Markdown. Design memos in Markdown.

The content was just ordinary documentation.

Honestly, Notepad or Excel would have been more than enough.

But for reasons like:

“It’s easier to manage in Git” “It’s more engineer-like” “It’s modern”

— the whole team was forced to deal with Markdown syntax.

And Then Begins “Dialect Hell”

The thing is, Markdown isn’t as standardized as it looks.

Works on GitHub. Breaks on another wiki. Line breaks behave differently. Tables fall apart.

In the end, you start hearing things like:

“In this environment, you need blank lines” “Mix in some HTML tags here” “That syntax isn’t supported”

Was this really productive?

For Memos, Plain Text Is Fine

Lately, I’ve come to think the opposite.

Thinking notes can be much rougher.

Plain text is enough.

Conversely, when you’re presenting a deliverable, HTML feels more natural.

It integrates fully with CSS. The structure is clear. It’s a web standard itself.

Markdown is left dangling in the middle.

In the AI Era, “Half-Baked Abstractions” Will Fade

Where AI shines is “conversion.”

Turning rough notes into clean, structured HTML. Turning bullet points into proper documents. Turning JSON into UI.

In other words, Markdown — a simplified notation for humans — is losing relative value.

Of course, for things like README files, it’ll stick around.

But the era where “forcing Markdown” was seen as modern is, I suspect, about to end.

By the Way, This Blog Itself Is Written in Markdown

Here’s the punchline: this very blog is actually written in Markdown.

And when I first started writing it, I got irritated by exactly those dialect differences. “You need blank lines here,” “tables break on this platform” — quite a bit of time got eaten up by that kind of tweaking.

These days, I’ve given up resisting. I throw my rough thinking notes at the AI and have it convert them to Markdown for me.

…And writing this far, a thought hit me.

If I’m letting AI do the conversion anyway, why not just use HTML?

Yes — that’s exactly where this circles back to. Markdown’s reason for being as an intermediate layer is being eaten by AI.

Note: This article is a personal opinion piece, so I’m not taking counter-arguments :)