The Blogger-King

While you were dismissing bloggers as relics of Web 2.0, they were accidentally training to become the most powerful people in the AI age.

Plato’s Philosopher-King combined wisdom with power to create the ideal ruler. The AI age has its own version: the Blogger-King—someone who spent 15 years mastering the one language that gives you maximum leverage over AI: Markdown.

This sounds absurd. Bloggers? The people who never pivoted to video? Who kept writing long-form text while everyone else moved to TikTok? Those bloggers are now the most powerful?

Yes. And I can prove it.

The Accidental Training Montage (2004-2024)

Markdown was created in 2004 by John Gruber. It spread through the blogging community in the mid-2000s, became the standard format for technical documentation on GitHub, and quietly became the backbone of how knowledge is organized on the internet.

While the rest of the world pivoted to video, Instagram, TikTok, and every other visual medium, a small cohort of people kept blogging. They kept writing in Markdown. They kept organizing information with headers, lists, code blocks, and frontmatter.

Everyone told them blogging was dead. “Video is the future.” “Nobody reads anymore.” “Long-form text is over.” They kept writing anyway.

For 15-20 years, these people practiced:

• Information hierarchy (what should be H1 vs H2 vs H3)
• Scannable content structure (how to make complex information digestible)
• Metadata organization (TOML and YAML frontmatter)
• Embedding code samples (polyglot content with syntax highlighting)
• Clear, precise technical writing
• Managing large collections of .md files

They accumulated thousands of hours doing exactly this. While you were learning TikTok dances, bloggers were learning YAML frontmatter. While you were optimizing for the YouTube algorithm, bloggers were perfecting information architecture in plain text.

The skill everyone said was obsolete.

Markdown: The Lingua Franca of AI

Then AI happened.

AI models were trained on billions of Markdown files. GitHub repositories, Stack Overflow answers, Reddit posts, technical documentation—the majority of structured technical knowledge on the internet is in Markdown format.

The result: AI naturally speaks Markdown. When Claude, GPT, or Gemini generates a response, it formats in Markdown. Code blocks, headers, lists, tables—these aren’t features added later. They’re fundamental to how these models understand and generate structured information.

Every AI coding tool uses Markdown:

• Claude Code stores context in Markdown
• Cursor operates through Markdown-formatted conversations
• ChatGPT outputs Markdown formatting
• GitHub Copilot understands Markdown comments
• My own tool, Chatvim, uses Markdown files as the interface for AI chats in Neovim

I wrote about this in Why Store Chats in Markdown Files: “Markdown is the lingua franca of LLMs.” That wasn’t metaphor. It’s literally the common language between humans and AI.

I went further in The Markdown Programming Language, arguing that Markdown has become a legitimate programming language in 2025. When you write specifications in Markdown and feed them to AI agents, they generate working code. The Markdown is your source code. The TypeScript or Python the AI generates is just compiled output.

Markdown is both the input language (how you write specs, requirements, and prompts) and the output language (how AI returns structured information). It’s the interface layer between human intent and machine execution.

Why Bloggers Are Masters

Here’s what bloggers have that nobody else does: 15 years of practice organizing complex information in exactly the format that AI works best with.

They understand information hierarchy instinctively. When you need to write a specification for an AI agent, the structure matters enormously. Headers create the hierarchy AI uses to understand your intent. Lists specify requirements in parseable format. Code blocks provide examples. Bloggers do this automatically. It’s muscle memory.

They write clear, scannable content. AI benefits from the same qualities that make content readable for humans—clear structure, logical flow, unambiguous language. Bloggers have spent years optimizing for this.

They know how to organize large amounts of information coherently. Managing a blog with hundreds of posts teaches you information architecture. How to categorize, how to cross-reference, how to maintain consistency. These same skills apply when building documentation for AI agents.

They embed code samples naturally. Technical bloggers have been writing polyglot content—prose mixed with code in multiple languages—since the beginning. This is exactly the format that works best for AI specifications.

They understand metadata. Frontmatter with TOML or YAML provides structured data AI can parse. Bloggers have been using this for years to organize posts. Now it’s how you configure AI behavior and maintain context.

The key insight: Bloggers weren’t just writing content. They were learning to structure human knowledge in machine-readable format.

The Power of the Blogger-King

Here’s the punchline: Markdown mastery equals AI leverage.

When I write prompts for Claude Code, I structure them in Markdown. Headers for sections, lists for requirements, code blocks for examples. This isn’t accidental style—it’s the optimal format for AI to parse my intent.

When I document my projects, I maintain AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files. These are Markdown files that teach AI agents how my codebase works. The better structured the Markdown, the better the AI performs. I wrote about this workflow in How I Use Claude Code to Do My Entire Job.

Better documentation in Markdown means better context means better AI output means better code. The chain is direct. If you can organize information clearly in Markdown, you can leverage AI effectively.

This is why I said in We Are All Software Architects Now that we’re moving to a higher level of abstraction where “system design using English as the primary language” becomes the job. But it’s not just English—it’s structured English. It’s Markdown.

The blogger who can write clear specifications in Markdown is a 10x engineer. Not because they’re inherently better programmers, but because they have the interface skill that maximizes AI leverage.

They combine wisdom (information organization) with power (AI leverage). Just like Plato’s Philosopher-King. The ruler who combines knowledge with authority. The blogger who combines Markdown mastery with AI tools.

Plato insisted the ideal ruler must practice their craft for decades before ascending to power. The Blogger-King has been practicing for 20 years.

The Magnificent Irony

Let’s acknowledge the full absurdity here.

Timeline of consensus opinions:

• 2010: “Blogging is dying, social media is taking over”
• 2012: “If you’re not on video, you’re invisible”
• 2015: “Blogging is dead, long live YouTube”
• 2018: “The future is visual: Instagram, Snapchat, Stories”
• 2020: “TikTok is the future, text is over”
• 2022: “Nobody reads anymore, everything is video now”

And then:

• 2023-2025: AI emerges as the dominant technology
• 2025: AI speaks… Markdown

AI can’t watch your TikTok videos. Not reliably, not yet. AI can’t process your YouTube vlog. Not with the same fidelity as text. AI can’t parse your Instagram story. It’s visual content optimized for human eyeballs, not machine parsing.

But AI can read your Markdown blog posts perfectly. Every header, every list, every code block. The structure is clear, the information is parseable, the format is exactly what the models were trained on.

The obsolete skill became the most valuable. The dismissed art became the crown jewel. The people who “failed to pivot to video” were actually training for the next paradigm.

I wrote in I Embrace AI Slop about how critics of new paradigms always judge by early-stage quality and miss the trajectory. The web was dismissed as unreliable. Wikipedia was mocked as untrustworthy. Both won completely.

Here’s another pattern the critics missed: the bloggers who ignored the “pivot to video” advice were positioning themselves perfectly for the AI age. Not intentionally—they just liked writing. But the result is the same. They have a 15-year head start on the critical skill.

The First Technical Skill of the AI Age

If you want to maximize your AI leverage in 2026, the first skill to master is Markdown.

Not Python. Not TypeScript. Not prompt engineering in the abstract. Markdown. The ability to structure information clearly in this specific format.

Because Markdown is:

1. Human-readable - You can write and edit without tools
2. Machine-parseable - AI can extract structure and meaning reliably
3. Version-controllable - Plain text that diffs cleanly in git
4. Universal - Works in terminal, editor, browser, AI agent
5. Polyglot - Can embed any programming language
6. Structured - Headers and lists provide hierarchy
7. Standard - GitHub-Flavored Markdown is a de facto standard

Every other skill builds on this foundation. You can learn Python, TypeScript, Rust, whatever—but if you can’t organize your requirements and specifications clearly in Markdown, you can’t leverage AI effectively.

Bloggers have this foundation. They’ve had it for 15 years. Everyone else is learning it now.

Long Live the Blogger-King

Here’s the conclusion that sounds like a joke but is actually deadly serious:

The people who kept blogging in 2024 are the best equipped for 2025.

The people who accumulated thousands of hours organizing information in Markdown files have the most valuable technical skill for the AI age.

The people who were dismissed as out-of-touch for not pivoting to video have a massive competitive advantage over the TikTok influencers and YouTube creators who never learned text-based information architecture.

Plato was right all along. The ideal ruler must practice their craft for decades in obscurity before their moment arrives. Bloggers have been practicing since 2004. Writing, structuring, organizing, refining. Building up tens of thousands of hours of experience with the one format that matters most for AI leverage.

The Blogger-King’s time has come.

If you’re reading this, you probably already understand. You’re probably already a blogger, or someone who appreciates long-form technical writing. You get why Markdown matters. You understand that the interface language between humans and AI isn’t just English—it’s structured English, organized in a specific format that both humans and machines can parse reliably.

You’ve been training for this. Maybe you didn’t know it. Maybe you were just writing because you liked writing. But the result is the same: you have the skill everyone else is scrambling to learn.

So write your blogs. Maintain your Markdown files. Organize your information with headers and lists and code blocks. Document your projects in AGENTS.md files. Structure your knowledge in .md format.

You’re not just blogging. You’re practicing statecraft for the AI age.

Long live the Blogger-King.