Generative AI workflows and hacks 2026

1 OpenAI broke copy-paste of mathematics

The ChatGPT client used to generate lovely markdown that I could use where I wanted structure (math, code, tables) and HTML for text-y unstructured things.

That was a good time. A few months ago they totally fucked it up and they’ve shown no interest in fixing it. We can no longer copy-paste tidy, structured markdown from ChatGPT — just the slobbery mess of HTML.

I suspect OpenAI’s interest isn’t the chat clients — that’s a legacy product they keep around while they plan on brain-computer interfaces or utility fog or something. The fix won’t come from them.

Solutions:

Firstly, move to a good client like Jan that preserves markdown copy-paste and as a bonus lets us use diverse backends.

Alternatively and lazily, open the chat we want to copy in the web browser and then use a browser extension to convert the HTML. Here are two recommended to me:

• Chrome: Markdown Capturer - BibCit
• Firefox: ChatGPT LaTeX Copy Fix

Partial fix: Use a macOS script to convert clipboard HTML to markdown. Here is a fish

function chat2md
    if not type -q pandoc; echo "Install pandoc: brew install pandoc" >&2; return 1; end

    pbpaste -Prefer public.html 2>/dev/null | \
    sed 's/class="Apple-converted-space"//g; s/<span[^>]*>//g; s/<\/span>//g' | \
    pandoc -f html+raw_html -t markdown+raw_tex+tex_math_dollars+fenced_code_blocks+hard_line_breaks --wrap=preserve -s |
    pbcopy
    echo "HTML → Markdown complete (LaTeX, code, newlines preserved)"
end

TBH, this still messes with markdown math, but it preserves code blocks and newlines, which is a win.

2 Google is still a bit shit at copy-pasteable content

Google broke its markdown output in an interesting way: links don’t work in the output docs. This is particularly infuriating in my favourite product of theirs, Deep Research, which is supposed to be about citations and links, and yet it can’t link URLs to text (try copy-pasting the output to get inline citations if you don’t believe me).

For this reason, and because Gemini subscriptions are annoying and have shitty bundle pricing, the moment Google released an API version of Google Deep Research, I wrote a Google Deep Research client that does all kinds of clever stuff

See danmackinlay/gemini_deep_research_client. It does quite a lot to make sure the output works, including links, mathematics, and the other things researchers actually want included in their work. Pull requests welcome.