Show HN: Inkling – ask Claude Code for a doc, get HTML instead of Markdown | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Inkling – ask Claude Code for a doc, get HTML instead of Markdown

github.com

1 pointmeet_vyas6 comments

fyi, https://huggingface.co/thinkingmachines/Inkling

https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/

Yeah, my bad naming. Inkling sounded nice and kind of resonated. But yes, it is not related to the inkling that you pasted.

I didn't see an single example generated output.

Why bother posting

Actually I have added one comment to this post, however, it is not visible to anyone but me.

There are examples in the README file in the repo. Pasting them here as well: --> Live tutorial — the interactive walkthrough that brought you here - https://meetvys.github.io/inkling/

--> Vision doc example — a project's vision rendered as an inkling artifact - https://meetvys.github.io/inkling/examples/vision/

--> inkling explainer — the skill explained as one of its own outputs - https://meetvys.github.io/inkling/examples/doc-explained/

Some documents aren't mostly words. An explainer, an HLD, a system design doc — they want visual elements: diagrams, charts, flow charts, things you can click into. HTML, CSS and JS are perfect for that, and always have been. The doc becomes much more than words.

Hand-writing it was never practical. Nobody codes a stylesheet and an interactive SVG for an internal design doc — the hours don't justify it.

Agents are very good at HTML, CSS and JS. That cost is gone. So why stay limited to a markdown file?

Inkling is a Claude Code skill built on that. You talk in plain English — "create a doc for the Q1 onboarding revamp, chart this CSV as a funnel" — and the agent designs and edits a real folder on your disk: index.html, style.css, runtime.js, data/. Turn by turn, as you think out loud. No slash commands, no templates.

Live tutorial, built with itself: https://meetvys.github.io/inkling/

How it works:

- The doc folder is the source of truth. There is no markdown file behind it.

- Every doc opens in a browser straight from disk. No server, no build step, no dependencies.

- The agent designs each doc instead of filling a template. It records what structure and behavior it invented on each turn, and fails itself if a render only reuses what already existed.

- `freeze` collapses a doc into one shareable .html file.

It is V0: each doc carries its own copy of the CSS and JS, so nothing compounds across docs yet, and it needs Claude Code installed.

But the thing I actually want opinions on is the premise, not the tool. HLDs, system design docs and explainers live in markdown files and Google Docs today — where a diagram is a pasted screenshot that goes stale, and a table is numbers someone retyped by hand. I think that is a mismatch between what those documents are and the format we keep putting them in.

So: does this class of document want to be an interactive HTML artifact? Or is markdown genuinely good enough, and I am solving a problem people do not have?

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