Paste a link. Get the article in five points.
For the long read you saved three weeks ago and still have not opened. Works on news, essays, blog posts and documentation.
What you get back
Five sentences, each carrying one idea, each keeping the numbers and names that make it checkable. Not a vague paraphrase of the headline, and not a rewrite of the opening paragraph, which is what a lot of summarizers quietly produce.
The point is to let you decide in twenty seconds whether the full piece is worth your next twenty minutes. Sometimes the brief is the whole answer. Often it tells you the piece is better than the headline suggested.
Where a URL brief goes wrong
- Paywalls. We read what a normal visitor reads. If the page shows three paragraphs and a subscribe wall, that is what gets summarized. Paste the text directly instead.
- Pages that build themselves in JavaScript. Some sites deliver an empty shell to anything that is not a browser. If the brief comes back thin or the fetch fails, copy the text and use the paste box.
- Listicles and roundups. A post that is genuinely twelve unrelated items does not have five points. It has twelve. You will get the strongest few.
Briefs of public pages can become public
When you brief a public URL, the result may be saved as a page in our open library at /s/, so the next person searching for that same article finds an answer instead of a dead end. Pasted text is never published. Neither are PDFs, which are not even uploaded.
Questions
Does it work on paywalled articles?
Only on the part a normal visitor can see. If the page is gated, copy the text you have access to and paste it directly instead of using the URL.
What happens if the page fails to load?
Some sites render entirely in JavaScript or block automated readers. Pasting the text works in every one of those cases.
Will my brief be made public?
Only briefs of public URLs may become library pages. Text you paste and PDFs you drop are never published.