I love Markdown. I love it so much that I even built a frictionless writer for WordPress called PootleWriter that uses Markdown (and that this article was written with). The entire point was to remove friction between thought and publication. No buttons. No clutter. Just you and the words.
Which is why I feel qualified to say it is completely terrible.
Markdown is the beige Volvo of human expression. It is reliable, sensible, economical, and it will get your words safely from your brain to the internet without any dangerous excitement, like personality.
And that was fine. Because until recently, the main thing reading your Markdown was other humans. Tired humans. Distracted humans. Humans who were willing to do some interpretive work and might generously imagine that your bullet points contained depth.
But now the main thing reading your Markdown is an AI agent. And to an AI agent, Markdown is not a brand, or a feeling, or a voice. It is a grocery list.
Everyone is suddenly cooking for robots
Right now, something faintly absurd is happening. Everyone is sprinting to add Markdown versions of their websites, carefully preparing neat, flavourless text files and placing them outside like badly prepared meals for passing AI bots to sweep up and gulp down as they move through the neighbourhood.
You can almost picture it. Website owners peeking through the curtains, whispering, “Maybe this one will eat mine.”
Not only is this unnecessary, it is slightly tragic. AI does not need your help translating one codified language into another codified language. HTML is already structured. AI is extremely good at reading it. Translating HTML into Markdown for an AI is like translating English into slightly simpler English in case the listener is struggling, only to discover the listener has a PhD in English and is now quietly judging you.
We are not feeding the AI. We are stripping ourselves.
In the process, we are removing the very things that make us distinctive.
Imagine listening to Mozart as sheet music read out loud
Imagine I tell you that tonight you are going to experience one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. You sit down. The lights dim. And then someone hands you a sheet of paper that says:
E4 quarter note
G4 quarter note
C5 half note
And they say, “There you go. Enjoy.”
You would say, “I’m sorry, but where is the orchestra?” And they would say, “No, no. That is the orchestra. That is the information.”
Technically, they would be correct. And yet they would also be banned from hosting dinner parties ever again.
Because Mozart is not the notes. Mozart is the interpretation, the timing, the hesitation, the swelling of sound, the emotion, the taste.
The notes are just the skeleton. The music is the soul.
Markdown is the skeleton. Your brand is the soul.
We have started stripping ourselves for the machines
For the past six months, we have been doing something quietly strange. As agents have appeared, we have started rushing to reorganise our expression for their convenience. We are taking rich, designed, human experiences and flattening them into clean, efficient text streams.
We removed the typography, the layout, the pacing, and the weird little creative decisions that make something feel like you. We replaced it with headings, bullet points, and clean, efficient structure, which is fantastic if your goal is to describe a toaster, and less fantastic if your goal is to describe a personality.
In a recent Automattic advisory call, Stephen Wolfram made a brilliant point that now seems so obvious it felt like being told that water is wet. When AI consumes our content, it primarily sees the information layer.
But humans do not experience the information layer.
We experience the presentation layer.
The taste layer.
The style layer.
The human layer.
And that layer is mostly missing.
Taste is the last mile
Two websites can contain the exact same words. One feels premium. The other feels like it was created by a municipal parking authority.
This is not because of Markdown. This is because of taste.
Taste is spacing. Taste is restraint. Taste is knowing when to stop. Taste is when you break the rules on purpose.
Taste is when something feels like it was made by a person who cared.
Markdown cannot represent that. It can only represent the words.
It cannot represent the silence between the words.
Agents do not see your brand
We are now entering a world where agents will increasingly speak on our behalf. They will summarise us, recommend us, and represent us.
And what they see is Markdown.
Which means what they see is the flattened, compressed, personality-free version of you.
It is like trying to understand David Bowie by reading his grocery receipts. Yes, technically, he did buy milk.
But that was not the point.
We do not need better notes. We need a new score.
The mistake is not Markdown itself. Markdown is useful. It is fast, portable, efficient, and wonderfully boring.
The mistake is believing that the notes are the music.
We do not need to rush to produce cleaner skeletons for machines to consume. Machines can already read the skeleton. What they cannot see, unless we preserve it, is the performance.
In an agentic world, information becomes cheap. Taste becomes expensive. Style becomes the signal. And trust becomes gold.
Which leaves the real question not for us, but for the AI engines.
How do you carry the performance?
My prediction is simple. The AI that figures out how to preserve taste, style, and trust will win. Not the one that reads the notes best. The one that plays the music.
And my recommendation, in the meantime, is not to obsess over producing perfect Markdown for the machines.
Obsess over building your brand.
Obsess over creating trust.
Obsess over making beautiful things.
Because I believe that is what humans will crave in an agentic future. And in a few years time, we will look back at this moment, watching everyone rush to flatten themselves into text files for robots, and it will all feel incredibly obvious.
Of course it was never about the notes.
It was always about the music.
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Update: Dries Buytaert (Founder of Drupal) has published some research that backs up this article 👀
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