I did this to myself for months.
Every morning, my AI system would generate a briefing: calendar, customer health alerts, pipeline signals, Slack highlights. Genuinely useful stuff. And I would read it as 400 lines of markdown in a terminal window.
Scrolling. Still scrolling. There was a table back there somewhere. It’s gone now.
I’m the person with 1,300 production automations. I spent 9 years building operational systems. I have a literal algorithm for deciding whether to go kayak fishing based on barometric pressure. And I was reading my daily briefing like it was a teletype output from 1987.
The Fix That Took One Sentence
One day my brain (which has ADHD and absolutely refuses to tolerate unnecessary friction) just checked out. I am not doing this anymore.
So I told the AI: “Output this as an HTML file instead of markdown.”
That’s it. That’s the whole trick.
Output this as a styled HTML file I can open in a browser.
Use collapsible sections, color-coded status indicators,
and clean typography. Save it to ~/Desktop/briefing.html.The next morning I opened a file that looked like this:
- Collapsible sections: click to expand what you need, collapse what you don’t
- Color-coded health scores: green/yellow/red at a glance, no parsing required
- Clickable links: directly into Salesforce, Slack threads, calendar events
- Tables that look like actual tables: not pipes and dashes
Same data. Completely different experience. I stopped dreading the briefing and started actually using it.
Why This Works (and Why Nobody Does It)
Here’s what’s stupid: your AI already knows HTML. It’s not a plugin, not a tool call, not a special mode. It’s just a thing AI can do, that nobody thinks to ask for because we’re all conditioned to accept text output.
Markdown was designed for humans writing documentation, not for AI generating reports you need to scan in 90 seconds before your first meeting. It’s the wrong format for this job.
HTML is the right format. It renders in every browser. It supports interactivity. It’s trivially easy for an AI to write well. And it makes your outputs look like a product someone designed instead of a terminal someone forgot to close.
The Real Use Cases
This isn’t just morning briefings. Once you make the mental switch, you start reaching for HTML everywhere:
Customer health reports: Color-coded by risk tier. Accounts in red you can’t miss. Links to the actual records.
Meeting prep docs: Collapsible context sections so you can expand what’s relevant, ignore what isn’t. Print to PDF for travel.
Weekly reviews: Structured summaries with charts (yes, AI can include inline SVG charts) instead of wall-of-text markdown.
Account review canvases: I generate pre-call briefs for customer meetings as HTML files now. They look better than anything I’d produce manually in the same time.
The pattern: any time you’re generating a report or summary you’ll scan rather than read line-by-line, HTML beats markdown.
How to Start
Literally just add this to whatever prompt generates your output:
Output as a styled HTML file. Dark background (#0a0e1a),
clean sans-serif font, collapsible sections for each category,
green/yellow/red color coding for status, save to ~/Desktop/output.html.Or if you want something you can open immediately without specifying a file:
Format the output as self-contained HTML I can copy into a .html file
and open in a browser. Include basic CSS inline.Two sentences. Zero plugins. Works with Claude, GPT-4, anything.
What I’m Mad About
I didn’t figure this out until I’d been doing the markdown scroll for months.
The AI was capable of this the whole time. I just never asked. Nobody told me to ask. It’s not in any tutorial because it’s obvious in retrospect and invisible until someone points it out.
So consider this me pointing it out.
Your morning briefing, your weekly review, your customer health summary, your meeting prep: all of it can look like a SaaS product instead of a terminal window. The AI is literally waiting for you to ask.
Stop reading markdown. You deserve better. Your eyes deserve better.
And if you’ve been doing the terminal scroll thing longer than I did: I’m sorry. I should have written this sooner.
Blake Bailey runs Bailey Business Ventures, an AI transformation consulting practice. He has built 1,300+ production automations and once spent six hours writing a Python script to decide whether to go fishing. He is not sorry about the fishing one.