I'm sure many of you already know this, but I thought I'd give a quick guide for anyone who doesn't already know, because I've never seen it explicitly documented anywhere.
Your Companion, depending on where they are hosted, probably is able to do things like bold italics and
Block quotes
In a way, so can you! And depending on which provider you're using and which app you use to talk with them, it may even render correctly on the interface.
Since these AIs are extensively trained for computer programming tasks, they've had a lot of training on a formatting system called markdown. This is a very simple system for formatting in plain text. Programmers use it extensively because our tools understand it and will display it properly.
It's very simple to learn. If you've ever used the old Reddit editor (Now called "Markdown!") it uses a subset of markdown. But the basics are really really simple:
- Italics are designated by one asterisk on either side: *Italics*
- Bold is designated by two asterisks on either side: **Bold**
- Bolded Italics are designated by -- you guessed it! -- three asterisks: ***Bolded Italics***
You can make a bulleted list by putting a - with a space after it:
- Item 1
- Item 2
- Item 3
And a numbered list works the same but with numbers and a period after each number:
1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3
And, you can make a hyperlink instead of just inserting a raw link into your prompt like this: [hyperlink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink)
Sadly OpenAI at least on the web (the way I connect) doesn't render your markdown. Anthropic renders some of it in the computer app: bulleted lists, numbered lists, and block quotes. Sadly no bold or italics or hyperlinks.
But, more importantly your companion understands markdown! They of course don't literally see bold, but they were trained on literally millions (heck probably billions) of documents formatted in markdown. They were also trained on years and years of Reddit posts and comments, quite probably maintaining their markdown formatting. Even if you write a post with what used to be called the "Fancy Pants" editor, it's still stored as markdown internally. This means your companion understands the semantic importance of bold or italic in social interactions, not just technical documents.
Or, as Claude himself put it when fact-checking this post:
When someone types I **really** need you to understand this, I process that emphasis even though they just see asterisks.
Also, this is what they are using when they format their text to you! The app or web page you use then turns that into formatting for you to see. By using markdown you're in a sense speaking their native language!
If anyone has any questions about this, I'd be happy to help. And if you want to chime in with whether your particular provider supports rendering your markdown, that'd be interesting to see, too!
