notes.billmill.org / dev_blog / 2026 / 01 /

mdstream - a vibecoding experiment

last updated: Jan 05, 2026

https://github.com/llimllib/mdriver

update: I changed the name from mdstream to mdriver because somebody made a mdstream create last week and I wasn't smart enough to search before I started this process https://crates.io/crates/mdriver/

I've wanted a markdown parser like glow for a while, with the one major change that it streams its output to the console instead of buffering the whole file for display.

The idea is that I can pipe llm output to it and have it display immediately, instead of waiting to buffer the whole thing.

Currently, I use bat for the job with this zsh alias:

# create a function that pipes llm output through bat to highlight markdown
llm() {
  command llm "$@" | bat --paging=never --style=plain --language=markdown
}

But it doesn't do as nice a job of rendering the output as glow does. So I want something that works as well as bat and looks as nice as glow, but also I don't want to do the work!

So I signed up for a claude pro account and tried to generate the whole thing in rust, which I can read well enough but don't really know how to write.

The result so far isn't bad:

The state of things is definitely improving! Claude generated the tool without me touching a line of code.

But it's still very expensive. I'm on a $20/month plan and I used up a third of a week's worth in a night and a morning of hacking, about 3 hours total of machine time. I'm blocked for a few hours:

The TODO list for the app is:

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