Code spans, HTML tags, and autolinks have the same precedence. Thus, this is code:
Input:
`<a href="`">`
Render:
<p><code><a href="</code>">`</p>
The problem is that this doesn’t work for <pre> tags when any part of the input markdown following the code span contains preformatted text. (Example shown in my reply to this post.)
This issue does not occur when the document contains pre-formatted text before the code span containing <pre>, or when the document does not contain pre-formatted text at all.