I was working with an agent to produce a new widget. I gave it a research task, gave it a direction, and when it came back I immediately stopped prompting it further to investigate what it did.

Vincent D. Warmerdam

A developer shares a discovery made while using an AI coding agent to build an interactive widget. The agent produced code that used a little-known KaTeX feature — the `\htmlData` command — which attaches data attributes to individual `` elements in rendered math. Unlike MathJax, which outputs a single `<svg>`, KaTeX renders each element in its own ``, making it possible to bind DOM events to specific parts of a math expression. The post reflects on the value of pausing to study AI-generated code you don't fully understand, as it can reveal patterns and techniques you'd otherwise miss.

worthy of study

I’ve had the same with a couple of CSS properties I’d never have gone looking for. It only works if you’re reading the diff properly though, and it’s easy to skim once the thing works. I’ve started asking the agent to explain anything I don’t recognise before I approve it, partly to learn it and partly because that’s where the invented ones turn up.
That last bit is a tenet of ours: <a href="https://prickles.org/tenet/verify-the-api/AI5" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://prickles.org/tenet/verify-the-api/AI5</a>