HTML Is All Agents Need
Official Schedule Context
- Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 11:10am-11:30am
- Track/room: Generative Media · Track 1
- Speaker(s): James Russo
- Session type/status: session · confirmed
Official Description
LLMs are great at writing code. So the question we kept asking was: can they write code that
produces a video? We thought it would be easy. The reality was a year of trying. We started with
massive prompts to get very mediocre output. We made it more agentic to iterate and improve its
output. This worked okay but wasn't production-ready. Eventually we tried Remotion. It got us
deterministic video, but the React framework kept boxing the agent in. The more guardrails we added,
the safer and more boring the outputs got. When we utilized plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the
creativity came back to the output. So we set out to build a video rendering framework on top of
HTML. But it needed to work with Gemini Flash. Why? Because one tell that a framework is fighting an
agent is needing the biggest model just to get usable output. So from there we shaped the framework
around what small models could reliably author. That left one real engineering question: can we keep
the freedom of HTML and still render a deterministic MP4? Browsers don't want to do that. Image
decoders, font loaders, and animation clocks all run async on their own schedule. Great for
performance. Terrible for "render the same pixels every time." Throughout, we iterated constantly
with agentic loops and self-improving evals to test out the framework, find issues in our renderer,
and shape a set of skills that gave the agents Taste instead of guardrails. This talk is what it
took to get there.
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