What this tool does
The TL;DR Generator condenses any text into a one-sentence lead plus three bullets — under 80 words total. The structure is deliberate: TL;DR means "too long; didn't read," so a five-paragraph summary defeats the purpose. The format forces ranking — one sentence for the single most important point, three bullets for the next-most-important details. Anything more is restating the source.
What works well as input
- News articles and blog posts — the model is trained on similar text and produces clean summaries.
- Long emails / email threads — paste the whole thread, get the gist + the open questions.
- Meeting transcripts — from Otter, Descript, YouTube captions, Zoom transcripts. Works especially well when the meeting had clear decisions.
- Research papers and dense docs — produces a layperson-readable version of the abstract.
What doesn't work as well
- Fiction and creative writing — summaries flatten the experience that makes fiction work.
- Code — the model can describe what code does, but other tools (code-explainers) handle this better.
- Pure data dumps — tables, CSVs, log files. The model will try, but the output isn't a summary so much as a structural description.
- Text where the main point is buried in the middle — the model tends to summarize what's at the top. If you can rearrange your paste, do.
Privacy note
Pasted text passes through the AI worker. We don't store it permanently — there's a 7-day content-hash cache (no plaintext kept) so identical pastes return identical summaries free of charge. Standard Cloudflare access logs (IP, timestamp, URL) are kept per their retention policy. We don't sell, share, or train models on your pastes.