Chat interface like chatgpt are great entry to LLMs, they can answer your queries and chat interfaces are great for that. But increasingly more people use LLMs for writing code, generating images, documents, review pull requests, generate slides, research and so on. If you think intutively a chat based application is not an interface designed for working with these modalities.
Some improvements have happened, most noteworthy being claude artifacts, which render documents generated by agents in its own preview pane, and most recently clicky.
Markdown as the de-facto
Markdown has some great qualities:
- Its easily readable by humans and agents alike
- Very portable, you can commit it in github or send over on an email attachment
- Big ecosystem of tools built around mardown.
- Information dense, unlike html which encodes a lot of extras like styling