[biot]

There are a few things in our implementation that make a more general solution unnecessary. We only need the output to support a limited set of markdown which is typically text, bullet points, and links. So we don't need code blocks (yet).

However, the second thing (not mentioned in the post) is that we are not rendering the markdown to HTML on the server, so []() markdown is sent to the client as []() markdown, not converted into <a href=...>. So even if a []() type link exists in a code block, that text will still be sent to the client as []() text, only sent in a single chunk and perhaps with the link URL replaced. The client has its own library to render the markdown to HTML in React.

Also, the answers are typically short so even if OpenAI outputs some malformed markdown links, worst case is that we end up buffering more than we need to and the user experiences a pause after which the entire response is visible at once (the last step is to flush any buffered text to the client).