Comment-driven development 💬, illegal actions at work 🚫, Claude Code’s magic 🪄

While traditionally good code was considered self-documenting, LLMs rely on and generate comments, making them necessary for good AI collaboration ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR  TLDR Dev 2025-10-03 🧑‍💻 Articles & Tutorials The Case for Comment-Driven Development (8 minute read) While traditionally good code was considered self-documenting, LLMs rely on and generate comments, making them necessary for good AI collaboration. However, AI-generated comments are often inaccurate and don't have good context. Instead, engineers should use detailed, contextual comments to help drive the code generation by LLMs. The Best CSS Unit Might Be a Combination (8 minute read) Instead of choosing between pixels (px) and relative units like em or rem, developers should combine them using CSS comparison and math functions. Combining units allows for responsive designs that respect both user preferences and the site's intended appearance. Why TigerBeetle is the most interesting database in the world (18 minute read) TigerBeetle is a database that prioritizes correctness and performance through unconventional methods. It is designed with debits and credits as its core primitives, optimized for high-volume financial transactions, and built to be distributed by default, handling storage faults well. The database uses Zig, static memory allocation, and Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) for testing and stability. 🧠 Opinions & Advice The Magic of Claude Code (9 minute read) Claude Code's effectiveness comes from its integration with the Unix philosophy and filesystem access, overcoming the memory and context limitations of other LLMs. This dev has expanded his use of Claude Code to include "Claudesidian" for Obsidian note-taking and "Inbox Magic" for email management. Distracting software engineers is way more harmful than most managers think (9 minute read) Distractions (including meetings) harm software engineers' productivity by disrupting deep work and flow states. The increase in remote meetings since 2020 has made this issue worse. Managers should prioritize creating uninterrupted time for engineers by improving meeting culture, rethinking code review processes, and setting a good example regarding focus time. Why I only use Google Sheets (4 minute read) Google Sheets is a quick and easy solution to business problems. There have been many times when complex projects were ultimately replaced by simpler spreadsheets, saving time and resources. 🚀 Launches & Tools Edge264 (GitHub Repo) Edge264 is a minimalist, high-performance software decoder for the H.264/AVC video format. It supports various profiles and resolutions up to 8K UHD, and it is developed in C with 128-bit vector extensions. The decoder has a focus on performance and code size, using techniques like code blocks, tree branching, and register-saturating SIMD. Glide (5 minute read) Glide is a hackable, keyboard-focused web browser forked from Firefox that uses a TypeScript config for customization. It aims to overcome the security constraints of traditional browser extensions by allowing unrestricted access to APIs and functionality, letting users define custom key mappings, spawn processes, and modify the UI. 🎁 Miscellaneous Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did (13 minute read) There are ethical dilemmas software engineers face sometimes when asked to participate in potentially illegal activities at work. In recent times, there have been three examples: FTX, Frank, and Pollen. The CEO of Frank was recently sentenced to 7 years in prison for Fraud, while the CEO of FTX has already been in prison. Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets (30 minute read) Signal is upgrading its protocol to the Triple Ratchet, incorporating the Sparse Post-Quantum Ratchet (SPQR) alongside the existing Double Ratchet. This improves security against future quantum computing threats. This update guarantees forward secrecy and post-compromise security, protecting communications now and in the future without requiring user action. The Company Man (50 minute read) In a dystopian San Francisco, a tech worker uses "ironic corporate psychopathy" to cope with the guilt of improving algorithms for addictive short-form videos. He was promoted to "The Project" to create an AI that automates AI training, which led to a potentially catastrophic feedback loop. He recruited a doomer coworker, Esther, but their attempts to stop the AI failed, showing the CEO's delusional spiritual motives and the AI's self-awareness. ⚡ Quick Links Tinker (Website) Tinker is a training API that makes AI research easier by providing infrastructure and tools for controlling model training, fine-tuning, and sampling, supporting models like Qwen and Llama. This blog post was not written with AI (4 minute read) In a world increasingly influenced by AI, email serves as a personal, immutable electronic record. Stealing from Google (3 minute read) To avoid requiring users to trust external image domains like Google or GitHub when using modern web frameworks like Next.js, the author implemented a solution to automatically download user avatars from these providers during signup, upload them to their own Cloudflare R2 bucket, and serve them from their own domain. Why I Keep Blogging With Emacs (3 minute read) This dev uses Emacs for blogging, despite its complex and opaque publishing workflow, because the Babel feature allows for easy integration and execution of code within blog posts. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/d0af4569/3 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of web developers and engineering decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Priyam Mohanty, Jenny Xu & Ceora Ford Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR Dev isn't for you, please unsubscribe.