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+---
+name: "Render Matrix bot messages with HTML formatting"
+---
+
+# Story 188: Render Matrix bot messages with HTML formatting
+
+## User Story
+
+As a Matrix user chatting with the bot, I want messages to render with proper formatting (bold, lists, code blocks, etc.) so that responses are easy to read in Element and other clients.
+
+## Acceptance Criteria
+
+- [ ] Add pulldown-cmark dependency to server/Cargo.toml
+- [ ] Create a markdown-to-HTML helper function in the matrix module
+- [ ] Replace RoomMessageEventContent::text_plain(chunk) with text_html(plain, html) in the post_task at bot.rs:296-297
+- [ ] Plain text fallback (body field) still contains the original markdown for clients that don't support HTML
+- [ ] Existing paragraph-buffering and streaming behaviour is unchanged
+- [ ] Unit test for the markdown-to-HTML helper covering bold, lists, inline code, and code blocks
+
+## Out of Scope
+
+- TBD