My first published extension. Vibe coded, built for myself, now yours too.
Every morning I do the same thing: coffee, then three or four news portals. And most mornings I end up annoyed. Half the headlines are clickbait. Of the ones that aren’t, plenty bury the single sentence that actually matters at the very end, after five paragraphs of nothing. I kept opening tabs, scrolling to the bottom, and closing them again.
What I wanted was simple: to know whether an article was worth opening before opening it.
So I built TL;DR Peek.
What it does
Switch it on for a site, hover any link, and a small balloon appears with the page’s own description, plus a TL;DR written from the article’s actual text. Underneath, reading time, publication date and byline.
That second part is the point. Most pages publish either no description at all or a single marketing line that tells you nothing, so a preview built only from metadata is empty exactly when you need it most. TL;DR Peek reads the article instead.
Previews are off everywhere until you turn them on, one site at a time. My list is four news portals. Yours can be whatever you read.
How it works
Everything happens in your browser. When you hover a link, the extension fetches that page, pulls the article text out with Readability (the same engine behind Firefox’s Reader Mode) and ranks the sentences to pick the few that carry the story. It throws away cookie banners, subscribe pitches, photo credits and navigation along the way.
No server. No API key. No account. No analytics. Nothing is sent anywhere, and your cookies are never sent to the page being previewed. I didn’t build a backend because the whole thing doesn’t need one.
Where it doesn’t work
Pages rendered entirely by JavaScript, with no real HTML in the response, have nothing to read. Hard paywalls give you what any anonymous visitor gets, which is usually the first two paragraphs – often enough and sometimes not. And when a page genuinely has no description and no prose, the balloon says so instead of inventing something.
On vibe coding
This was vibe coded from start to finish, and I’m not going to be coy about it. I described what I wanted, argued with the details, tested it on my own morning routine, and shipped it. A few years ago this idea would have stayed a note in my phone. That shift still feels remarkable to me.
It’s yours
It’s free, and it’s in the Chrome Web Store:
I built it for myself, which means it’s tuned to how I read. If it picks the wrong sentence on a site you use, I’d genuinely like to know — that’s the part that gets better with other people’s mornings in it.
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