Rise of explorable blogs

16 Sep, 2026

I'm noticing a shift in blogging patterns on the internet in the last 6 months. The blogs have moved away from text/markdown based content and now are more interactive with all the javascript animations/sliders/buttons/graphs. Bret Victor calls these Explorable Explanations. Prior to 2026, I knew of 2 bloggers that consistently hit Hackernews frontpage with their explorable blogs:

1. ciechanow.ski
2. neal.fun (more of mini-games)

But in the past 6 months, I've seen this format:

1. Index on the left
2. main content in the middle with a lot of interactions
3. Notes in the right side margin

Listing out more examples that I've enjoyed a lot:

1. ezyang's interacive parallelize transformer

2. Learning to Solve Hard Problems in RL for LLMs by Never Giving Up

3. OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed cyber-attack on RubyGems

4. Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

There are more on X/Twitter that I find everyday...

My closing thoughts:

1. I like this format (a lot) and I welcome it. I think LLMs have allowed people to make internet a more whimsical place.
2. LLMs generate toooo much text (looking at you Claude) for explaining a simple concept. That's not how chat is supposed to work. I would've read the actual documentation instead. So this new format of LLM powered content is refreshing to see
3. I now feel limited by Bearblog platform. Markdown/Text is no longer the simplest blogging format. Chatting with LLMs is much easier and yields a significantly better blogging experience over all.

Just drop me an email if there are corrections or comments that you want to see here