Markdown Became the Control Plane for AI

Markdown, the plain-text formatting system created in 2004, has quietly become the backbone of AI systems, with AI agents reading instructions, skills, and configurations from .md files. Its success comes from a key design choice: it stays readable even without proper formatting tools, meaning AI models can "read" it naturally rather than parse it. Now, competing companies are racing to establish their own markdown-based instruction file standards, creating fragmentation similar to past tech format wars.