This guide was inspired by Thariq's article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML” - a piece by someone on the Claude Code team arguing that markdown files are quietly limiting how we use Claude, and that HTML artifacts are a better format for almost everything.
Their core argument: markdown forces Claude to dumb down how it communicates. HTML lets it actually build something you can interact with.
I read it, immediately thought of my outbound reply project, and built this the same day.
The article is worth reading in full: https://thariqs.github.io/html-effectiveness