How I Built a Chrome Extension That Summarizes Any Article in 2 Seconds Using AI

You know the workflow. You find a 12-minute article. You want the gist. So you Ctrl+A the whole page, paste it into ChatGPT, type "summarize this," and wait. Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds. Finally, a wall of text comes back that's somehow almost as long as the original article. Then you do it again on the next tab. And the next one. And by the fourth article, you've spent more time summarizing than you would have spent just reading. I got tired of this loop. Not because the AI part was bad -- GPT does a fine job summarizing -- but because the workflow was broken. The friction of copy, switch tab, paste, wait, read, switch back... it adds up. So I built a Chrome extension called TLDR that does the whole thing in one click, in about two seconds. Here is what I learned building it. What TLDR Does Click the extension icon. Get a summary. That's it. Behind one click, the extension extracts the article text from the page, sends it to an LLM, and renders a summary with key bullet points in a c