Ask HN: Can any LLM one-shot a Markdown viewer with automatic indentation?

1 prmph 0 5/27/2025, 2:55:54 PM
Here a test for the LLM believers:

I have been frustrated that most markdown viewers don't do automatic indentation of section levels. It makes a world of difference in being able to scan larger documents and pick out what you want easily. The next step would be to allow section folding, but for now just indentation would be very useful.

Word processors do it, and it seems like a pretty simple to implement for markdown, so I don't know why most MD editor don't have it.

Anyway, I thought, this is a perfect test of LLMs and AI code assistants. The problem and solution is straightforward conceptually, and I don't even care about the platform and architecture used to accomplish it.

Here's my prompt:

> Implement a simple markdown viewer web application, maybe using the file API, that allows one to open a local .MD file, and displays it with automatic indentation of sections based on their level. Use Typescript, on Node or Bun or similar. I intend to run the app on MacOS

So far (last tested a month or two ago) all the major models fall flat. Some even give me code that will not run; of the rest, none has provided code that basically does the thing I've asked for.

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