The code and data behind xeiaso.net
fix(blog/markdownlang): fixups after being reviewed
Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@xeiaso.net>
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lume/src/blog/2026/markdownlang.mdx
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lume/src/blog/2026/markdownlang.mdx
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# social: false
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---
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In Blade Runner, Deckard (the protagonist) hunts down replicants, biochemical labourers that are basically indistinguishable from humans. They were woven into the core of Blade Runner's society with a temporal Sword of Damocles hung over their head: four years of life, not a day more. This made replicants desperate to cling to life; they'd kill for the chance of an hour more. This is why the job of the Blade Runner was so deadly.
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In Blade Runner, Deckard hunts down replicants, biochemical labourers that are basically indistinguishable from humans. They were woven into the core of Blade Runner's society with a temporal Sword of Damocles hung over their head: four years of life, not a day more. This made replicants desperate to cling to life; they'd kill for the chance of an hour more. This is why the job of the Blade Runner was so deadly.
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Metanarratively, the replicants weren't the problem. The problem was the people that made them. The people that gave them the ability to think. The ability to feel. The ability to understand and emphathize. The problem was the people that gave them the ability to enjoy life and then hit them with a temporal Sword of Damocles overhead because those replicants were fundamentally disposable.
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In Blade Runner, the true horror was not the technology. The technology worked fine. The horror was the deployment and the societal implications around making people disposable.
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I wonder what underclass of people like that exists today.
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In Blade Runner, the true horror was not the technology. The technology worked fine. The horror was the deployment and the societal implications around making people disposable. I wonder what underclass of people like that exists today.
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<Conv name="Numa" mood="neutral">
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This is why science fiction is inseparable from social commentary, all the
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Instead of using a parser, lexer, or traditional programming runtime, markdownlang programs are executed by large language models running an agentic inference loop with structured JSON and a templated prompt as an input and then emitting structured JSON as a response.
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Markdownlang programs can import other markdownlang programs as dependencies. In that case they will just show up as other tools like any other. If you need to interact with existing systems or programs, you are expected to expose those tools via [Model Context Protocol (MCP)](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro) servers that. MCP tools get added to the runtime the same way any other tools would.
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Markdownlang programs can import other markdownlang programs as dependencies. In that case they will just show up as other tools like any other. If you need to interact with existing systems or programs, you are expected to expose those tools via [Model Context Protocol (MCP)](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro) servers. MCP tools get added to the runtime the same way any other tools would. Those MCP tools are how you do web searches, make GitHub issues, or update tickets in Linear.
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### Why?
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Yeah, I realize that a lot of this is high-brow shitposting, but really the best way to think about something like markdownlang is that it's a new layer of abstraction. In something like markdownlang the real abstraction you deal with is the specifications that you throw around in Jira/Linear instead of dealing with the low level machine pedantry that is endemic to programming in today's Internet.
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Imagine how much more you could get done if the path to getting it done was just asking kindly. This is the end of syntax issues, of semicolon fights, of memorizing APIs, of compiler errors because some joker used sed to replace semicolons with greek question marks. Everything becomes strictly typed data that acts as the guardrails between snippets of truly high level language.
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Imagine how much more you could get done if you could just ask the computer to do it. This is the end of syntax issues, of semicolon fights, of memorizing APIs, of compiler errors because some joker used sed to replace semicolons with greek question marks. Everything becomes strictly typed data that acts as the guardrails between snippets of truly high level language.
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Like, looking at the entire langle mangle programming space from that angle, the user experience at play here is that kind of science fiction magic you see in Star Trek. You just ask the computer to adjust the Norokov phase variance of the phasers to a triaxilating frequency and it figures out what you mean and does it. This is the kind of magic that Apple said they'd do with AI in their big keynote [right before they squandered that holy grail](/blog/2025/squandered-holy-grail/).
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Even then, this is still just programming. Schemata are your new types, imports are your new dependencies, composition is your new architecture, debugging is still debugging, and the massive MCP ecosystem becomes an integration boon instead of a burden.
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## Future ideas
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From here something like this has many obvious and immediate usecases. It's quite literally a universal lingua francia for integrating any square peg into any other round hole. I guess the big directions I could go from here include:
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From here something like this has many obvious and immediate usecases. It's quite literally a universal lingua franca for integrating any square peg into any other round hole. The big directions I could go from here include:
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- Some kind of web platform for authoring and deploying markdownlang programs (likely with some level of MCP exposure so that you can tell your Claude Code to make an agent do something every hour or so and have it just Do The Right Thing™️ spawning something in the background).
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- It would be really funny to make a `markdownlang compile` command that just translates the markdownlang program to Go, Python, or JavaScript; complete with the MCP imports as direct function calls.
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The problem is not the technology. The real horror reveals itself when you consider how technology is deployed and the societal implications around what could happen when a tool like markdownlang makes programmers like me societally disposable. When "good enough" becomes the ceiling instead of the floor, we're going to lose something we can't easily get back.
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I guess the real horror for me is knowing that this kind of tool is not only possible to build with things off the shelf, but knowing that I did build it by having a small swarm of Claudes Code go off and build it while I did raiding in Final Fantasy 14. I haven't looked at basically any of the code (intentionally), and it just works well enough that I didn't feel the need to dig into it in much detail.
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The real horror for me is knowing that this kind of tool is not only possible to build with things off the shelf, but knowing that I did build it by having a small swarm of Claudes Code go off and build it while I did raiding in Final Fantasy 14. I haven't looked at basically any of the code (intentionally, it's part of The Bit™️), and it just works well enough that I didn't feel the need to dig into it in much detail. It's as if programmers now have our own Sword of Damocles over our heads because management can point at the tool and say "behave more like this or we'll replace you".
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This is the level of nuance I feel about this technology that can't fit into a single tweet. I love this idea of programming as description, but I hate how something like this will be treated by the market should it be widely released.
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