alt Hacker NewsI turned Markdown into a protocol for generative UI
There's a lot of work happening around both generative UI and code execution for AI agents. I kept wondering: how do you bring them together into a fully featured architecture? I built a prototype:
- Markdown as protocol — one stream carrying text, executable code, and data
- Streaming execution — code fences execute statement by statement as they stream in
- A mount() primitive — the agent creates React UIs with full data flow between client, server, and LLM
Let me know what you think!
Comments
OpenUI and JSON-render are some other players in this space.
I’m building an agentic commerce chat that uses MCP-UI and want to start using these new implementations instead of MCP-UI but can’t wrap my head around how button on click and actions work? MCP-UI allows onClick events to work since you’re “hard coding” the UI from the get-go vs relying on AI generating undertemistic JSON and turning that into UI that might be different on every use.
The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from
There’s definitely a lot of merit to this idea, and the gifs in the article look impressive. My strong opinion is that there’s a lot more to (good) UIs than what an LLM will ever be able to bring (happy to be proven wrong in a few years…), but for utilitarian and on-the-fly UIs there’s definitely a lot of promise
There seems to be a lot of movement in this direction, how do you feel about Markdown UI?
Using markdown as the transport layer is clever because every LLM already speaks it fluently. You're not teaching the model a new format, you're just giving existing behavior a runtime.
If you're still looking for a name let me suggest "hyper text".
It embodies the whole idea of having data, code and presentation at the same place.
If you're open for contributions I already have an idea for cascading styles system in mind.