Why Markdown Became the Documentation Format of the AI Era
· 7 min read
In 2004, John Gruber released Markdown with a modest pitch: a text format that is easy to read, easy to write, and converts cleanly to HTML. Twenty years later his side project became the default language of technical documentation — GitHub renders it natively, Stack Overflow is built on it, Obsidian and Notion popularized it, and every major LLM speaks it fluently. The Verge called it "the default language of the AI era."
That last part is the interesting one. Markdown didn't just survive the AI transition — it locked in because of it. This article walks through why, and what it means for how your team should write documentation inside Confluence.