You recorded a three-minute Loom of the staging site, sent it to Claude Code, and got nothing back. The agent cannot watch your video. You can either transcribe and annotate it yourself, or you can capture the same feedback in a form the agent reads directly. The choice between a video walkthrough and a markdown review is not about which tool is better in the abstract. It is about which one fits the next step in your workflow.
Below is a fair comparison on the axes that decide it: what the agent can consume, how long the review takes to produce, how precisely it points at things, and how well it holds up async.
What the receiving agent can actually consume
A Loom is an MP4 plus an auto-generated transcript. The transcript is linear speech with no structure, no pointers to UI elements, and no stable references to the screenshots inside the video. If you paste it into Cursor or Claude Code, the agent gets a wall of spoken text and no images at the moments that matter. You end up rewriting the transcript into a list of issues before the agent can do anything with it.
A markdown review is the opposite. Each item is a heading, a screenshot, a comment, and optional numbered pins that point at exact spots in the image. Cobalt Capture publishes that document at a public URL ending in /markdown, which is the format a coding agent reads directly. If you want the longer argument, see why Loom doesn't work with agents and the breakdown of what counts as agent-readable feedback.
Winner on this axis: markdown, by a wide margin. Loom is built for humans watching humans. If the next reader is an LLM, you are paying a translation tax.
Time to produce the review
Loom is fast to start and slow to finish. You hit record, talk for four minutes, stop, and you have a video. But if the agent needs structure, you now spend another ten or fifteen minutes scrubbing through the recording and writing out the issues. The total cost is the recording plus the transcription work.
A still-frame markdown review front-loads the structure. You click Capture screen, crop the still, dictate the comment with the browser's speech recognition, and move on. Each item takes maybe thirty seconds. A ten-item review runs five to seven minutes and is done. Nothing to transcribe later. The output is the artifact the agent reads. The lightweight Loom alternative approach trades the loose feel of talking through a screen for a finished document at the end.
Winner: depends on what you do next. If a human watches and acts, Loom is faster. If an agent or a teammate has to act from the recording, markdown wins on total time.
Precision when pointing at a specific thing
In a Loom you point with your cursor and say "this button here". The viewer has to catch the frame. The agent reading the transcript sees "this button here" with no anchor. You can pause and annotate inside Loom, but most reviewers do not.
With a still and a numbered pin, "pin 2 on the submit button, label is cut off at 320px width" is unambiguous. The screenshot is embedded, the pin is in the markdown, the comment names the field. This is the difference covered in screen capture vs screen recording: video carries motion well, stills carry precision well.
If the bug is a motion or timing issue (a jittery animation, a race condition that only shows on fast clicks), a still cannot capture it and a video can. That is a real case where Loom is the right tool. For layout, copy, accessibility, broken states, and missed empty states, stills are sharper.
Async clarity and re-reading
A teammate reviewing your Loom the next morning has to re-watch the parts they care about. They cannot scan it. They cannot grep it. They cannot link a colleague to item 7. The video is opaque to anything except watching.
A published markdown review at /r/<slug> is scannable in fifteen seconds. People with the link can comment on individual items. The owner marks each comment resolved. The same document exports to PDF and Word for stakeholders who want a file. This holds up well for client feedback on staging sites and QA bug reports where the reader is not present when you record.
Which one to pick
Pick Loom when the audience is a person, the content is a walkthrough or a demo, and motion matters. A product update video, an onboarding clip for a new hire, a screen recording of an intermittent visual glitch: Loom is the right shape.
Pick a markdown review when the next reader is a coding agent, when you want a written artifact at the end, or when reviewers will read async and need to address specific items. Most product feedback in an AI-in-the-loop workflow falls into this bucket. The feedback loop for vibecoding assumes you can hand the agent a structured document, not a video file.
You do not need to choose once and for all. A reasonable split: Loom for live walkthroughs and motion bugs, markdown for everything else. If you want to try the markdown side on a real review, start a new review without an account and see what the agent reads at the /markdown URL.