htmlEdit Blog

The document of the future is AI-native but human-editable, portable rather than trapped in a vendor's format, and built on the open web.

A tool that does one thing well beats a bloated platform that does ten things adequately.

Building a Mac app with an AI coding assistant sped up the mechanical parts and let me stay in the interesting decisions, but it moved the hard work to judgement: deciding what to build and knowing when the generated code was actually right.

Pair-programming with two AIs works if you stay the driver and treat them as navigators.

Have one AI review what the other produced, cold, without the original conversation.

Don't pick a favourite and use it for everything.

Editing an AI-generated document should not mean uploading it to someone else's server.

Treat Claude and Codex like two colleagues who don't share a memory.

If capturing an idea takes more than about two seconds, you'll lose most of your ideas.

Getting value from AI is a behaviour-change problem, not a tooling problem.

Split the work into two modes: use the model to draft and restructure, then switch to editing the rendered document directly for everything else.

Ask the AI to produce a self-contained HTML one-pager instead of a wall of chat text, then fix the last ten percent visually rather than re-prompting.

Ask for a single self-contained HTML file with clear structure and inline styles, and you get a document you can edit later instead of a tangle you have to re-prompt.

Don't review AI content by reading top to bottom like a proof-reader.

When an AI document is nearly right, editing the specific bits that are wrong is faster and more reliable than regenerating the whole thing and hoping the good parts survive.

When an AI draft is 90 percent right, don't re-prompt to fix the last 10 percent.

Re-prompting to make small edits is slow and unpredictable.

Editing the live rendered page, what you see is what you get, is faster and less error-prone than hand-editing raw HTML.

HTML is portable, universal, single-file and free of proprietary lock-in.

AI tools default to HTML because it is structured, universal and easy to render.