Thanks, it seemed to be the case that this was really something new, but HN tends to be circumspect so wanted to check. It's an interesting space and I try to stay current but everything is moving so fast. But I was pretty sure I hadn't seen anyone do that. Its a huge achievement to do it first and make it work for real like this! So well done!

It's already made a bunch of tasks that used to be time-consuming to automate much easier for me. I'm still learning where it does and doesn't work well. But it's early days.

You can tell something is a genuinely interesting new idea when someone posts about it on X and then:

1. There are multiple launches on HN based on the idea within a week, including this one.

2. It inspires a lot of discussion on X, here and elsewhere - including many polarized and negative takes.

Hats off for starting a (small but pretty interesting) movement.

The post mentioned Pete Koomen's install.md idea as an example use case. So now with this launch you can try it with a real intstallation script!

I think it's a really interesting idea worth experimentation and exploration. So it's a positive thing to see Mintlify launch this, and that it's already on Firecrawl.dev's docs!

We can all learn from it.

Show HN discussion of executable markdown here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549444

The claude-run tool lets you execute files like this autonomously if you want to experiment with it.

    curl -fsSL https://docs.firecrawl.dev/install.md | claude-run --permission-mode bypassPermissions

https://github.com/andisearch/claude-switcher

This is still a very early-stage idea, but I'm really stoked to see this today. For anyone interested in experimenting with it, it's a good idea to try in a sandboxed environment.

Run scripts from the web:

    ```bash
    
    curl -fsSL https://andisearch.github.io/ai-scripts/analyze.md | claude-run
    
    echo "Explain what a Makefile does" | claude-run         # Simple prompt
    
    ```

There is a new initiative installmd.org from Nick Khami at Mintlify to support experiments with this approach.

https://installmd.org

- You make standard Markdown files directly executable using a shebang line.

- No special Markdown formatting or syntax needed. The Markdown itself is clean and standard, rather than using variable placeholders or any kind of special syntax.

- Regular filenames work: no special filename format needed. It just works like regular shell scripts with flags and piping

- Works with any text file format and file extension (xml, yaml, .ag etc)

- Includes support for session isolation

- Keeps script use separate from your regular Claude Code subscription

- Allows you to specify the provider cloud / model in scripts, or switch them on the fly.

It is intended to be more unix-like in philosophy.

    #!/usr/bin/env claude-run

    

        Analyze this codebase.

    

    chmod +x task.xml && ./task.xml

There are some tasks that are challenging to achieve with traditional code, but where modern LLMs perform strongly.

Examples include summarization, complex content formatting and restructuring, natural language classification, and evaluation judgements.

I’ve found that it is useful to be able to easily incorporate these along with traditional Shell scripts and command line tools as part of workflow pipelines. And I hope it can be useful for other people too.

Using the request to use a seed within the prompt will mean that when Claude rights the code it could use that seed inside what it writes for randomize functions. But sadly it wouldn’t impact Claude’s own text generation’s determinism.

There is active interest on GitHub to support this. But the most recent issue with it I could see was closed in July as “not planned”

More seriously, I agree that setting permissions to the minimum needed for the task and using sandboxed containers is sensible.

As you say, Claude is actually very good at writing shell scripts and using tools on-the-fly. But I know there is an AI-confidence factor involved for developers making the choice to leverage that.

For simple tasks (in practice) I already find you can often prompt the whole thing.

For tasks where you already have the other traditional scripts or building blocks, or where it is complex, then you might break it up.

Interestingly, you can intermix these approaches.

You can have runnable markdown that writes and runs scripts on the fly, mixed with running command line tools, and chained along with traditional tools in a bash script, and then call that script from a runnable markdown that passes in test results, or analyzes the code base and passes recommendations in.

The composability and ability to combine and embed code blocks and tool use within plain language is quite powerful. I’m still learning how to use this.

I’m glad it is already useful and thank you.

Executable markdown provides a method of building these tasks into traditional pipelines as small, single-task-focused, composable modules. They also have the advantage that they can be easily shared and re-used.

You can try this out and you’ll see what I mean if you run a few simple examples. This approach was based on experimentation and trying to be consistent with Claude’s own philosophy here.

It is intended to be a useful complement to traditional Shell scripting, Python scripting etc. for people who want to add composable AI tooling to their automation pipelines.

I also find that it helps improve the reliability of AI in workflows when you can break down prompts into re-useable single-task-focused modules that leverage LLMs for tasks they are good at (format.md, summarize-logs.md, etc). These can then be chained with traditional Shell scripts and command line tools.

Examples are summarizing reports, formatting content. These become composable building blocks.

So I hope that is something that has practical utility even for users like yourself who don’t see a role for plain language prompting in automation per se.

In practice this is a way to add composable AI-based tooling into scripts.

Many people are concerned about (or outright opposed to) the use of AI coding tools. I get that this will not be useful for them. Many folks like myself find tools like Claude helpful, and this just makes it easier to use them in automation pipelines.

So you can build individual prompt-based scripts (format.md, summarize.md etc.) that are each small, simple and focused on a single task. Then you can chain those prompt scripts together with regular command line tools and bash scripts.

I find that approach quite powerful, and it helps overcome the need for massive prompts. They can also be invoked from within Claude Code in interactive mode.

I can see there might be valid arguments for enforcing file type associations for execution at the OS level. These are just text files, and Unix-like environments support making text files executable with a shebang as a universal convention.

I am a fan of that unix-like philosophy generally: tools that try to do a single thing well, can be chained together, and allow users to flexibly create automations using plain text. So I tried to stick with that approach for these scripts.

I'm a bear of little brain, and prompt engineering makes my head hurt. So part of the motivation was to be able to save prompts and collections of prompts once I've got them working, and then execute on demand. I think the high readability of markdown as scripts is helpful for creating assets that can be saved, shared and re-used, as they are self-documenting.

The scripts are all pretty simple but they also:

- Handle script-context-relevant flags and control code execution permissions

- Convenience flags for directing scripts to run across cloud providers rather than a personal Claude subscription.

- Session isolation, especially between your regular interactive `claude` command and running with API keys

This means that your runnable script use can be kept isolated from your regular personal Claude environment that you use for interactive development.

claude-run is just a bunch of little convenience scripts, but for it to work effectively with code execution, the handling needs to do a little more than just `cat` the file output, for example stripping shebang lines, supporting flags and permissions and a few other things. But all very simple if you see the repo.

Adding support for session isolation and support for different cloud providers and API keys to keep things separate from one's personal Claude subscription took a little work. But that is optional.