'DOCX Will Be Replaced by Markdown Within 5 Years' Sparks Pushback from Formats Veteran
bytebot · x · 2026-10-06
Hossein Mohtashami predicts that within 5 years the last docx will be phased out for Markdown: "Computers are for agents now, and token-efficient representations will dominate. It's going to be Python, Markdown, and JSON all the way down."
A developer who worked on OpenOffice and the Open Document Format pushed back hard: .doc dates to 1983 and .docx to 2006; Markdown won't deliver print and pagination fidelity, won't give the general population granular revision tracking in git, and layout complexity and the non-technical barrier remain unsolved.
The debate cuts to a real question: as agents become software's primary users, do human-friendly rich document formats still matter?
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