Thariq Shihipar

Sources#

• How I AI: Thariq Shihipar on Replacing Markdown with HTML for AI-Powered Development

Summary#

Engineer on the Claude Code team at Anthropic. Source of the "HTML is the new markdown" thesis (see HTML as the New Markdown) and the Compute Allocator framing of the human role. Interviewed by Claire Vo for the "How I AI" series after the two met at Code with Claude in San Francisco (episode published May 2026). Personal site thariq.io; on X as @trq212.

Notable claims and stances#

• "HTML is the new markdown." As models get more capable and projects more complex, markdown plans overwhelm the human reader; HTML is a richer medium that keeps humans engaged. The model isn't the bottleneck — human attention is. See HTML as the New Markdown.
• We're all becoming "compute allocators." The human's job is deciding what's worth spending compute on; ~1% of his generated tokens reach production, the other 99% is scaffolding (plans, interfaces, status, design systems) invested in alignment and communication. See Compute Allocator.
• Abundance mindset. Generation is cheap enough to afford throwaway tooling — micro-apps built for a single editing task ("micro-software on top of micro-software").
• Constraint plus latitude prompting. "Provide enough constraint to get what you want, but leave room for the model to surprise you" — "Hey, Claude, I trust you here."
• Recenter the human. His workflows are explicitly not about automating the developer away; they make collaboration more visible and engaging.

The three workflows he demonstrated#

1. Interactive HTML brainstorming and planning — ask for plans as HTML files, not lists; visual, scrollable, shareable.
2. Disposable Micro-Apps — generate a throwaway custom UI to edit one part of a plan, with copy-back-to-markdown.
3. Living Design System — a design_system.html extracted from repos as a portable, human- and machine-readable source of truth.

Connections#

• Claude Code — his team at Anthropic
• Anthropic — employer
• Claire Vo — interviewed him for "How I AI"
• HTML as the New Markdown — his central thesis
• Compute Allocator — his framing of the human role
• Disposable Micro-Apps / Living Design System — his other two workflows
• Boris Cherny — Claude Code teammate; "coding is solved (for me)" is the precondition for Thariq's allocator framing
• Harness Shrinkage as Models Improve — Thariq's 99%-scaffolding observation is the human-facing counterweight to the team's model-facing harness pruning
• Engineer PM Convergence — his compute-allocator framing is "deciding what to write" exercised at invocation scale
• AI Native Product Cadence — his richer-HTML-PRD bet is the counterpoint to Cat Wu's lighter-PRD bet
• Interaction Models — both target better human–AI collaboration; his HTML artifacts enrich the asynchronous channel where TML dissolves the real-time interface
• Software 3.0 — his HTML-first workflows and Disposable Micro-Apps are Software-3.0-native: per-task UIs spun up from a prompt rather than hand-built apps

Sources#

• How I AI: Thariq Shihipar on Replacing Markdown with HTML for AI-Powered Development — "How I AI" interview with Claire Vo (ChatPRD), May 2026