Stealing React components 🎨, Manufacturing as Code 🔨, give agents filesystems 📁

It's possible to "steal" or reconstruct any React component from a production website, even without access to its source code ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With  TLDR Dev 2026-01-13 Docusign for Developers: APIs, SDKs, and Extensibility Beyond eSignature (Sponsor) Many developers know Docusign as "the signature thing." But under the hood, there's a complete platform for building intelligent agreement workflows. The Docusign Developer Center gives access to 400+ API endpoints across eSignature, workflow automation (Maestro), AI-extracted agreement data (Navigator), web forms, and more. SDKs are available in C#, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby. The platform also supports extensions – custom apps that plug directly into Docusign to verify data, sync with external systems, or connect to cloud storage. Adding contract management to a SaaS product? Automating document flows for an internal tool? Whatever you're building, the APIs and tooling are already there. Get a free developer account → 🧑‍💻 Articles & Tutorials How to Steal Any React Component (6 minute read) It's possible to "steal" or reconstruct any React component from a production website, even without access to its source code. React Fiber is an internal tree structure in the browser that exposes which components create specific DOM elements and what props they receive. You can generate a component's code by collecting multiple examples of a component's props and its resulting HTML and feeding it into an LLM. How to build agents with filesystems and bash (3 minute read) A simple, effective architecture for AI agents is a standard filesystem and Bash tools. Since LLMs have a native understanding of code and Unix commands, agents can easily navigate and retrieve information from data structured as files, much like exploring a codebase. This approach overcomes the limitations of prompt stuffing and imprecise vector search by offering natural data hierarchies, exact retrieval, and minimal context loading. Replacing LLM date math with deterministic scripts to improve calendar accuracy (3 minute read) LLMs like Claude frequently fail at date math, causing calendar errors in tools like gcalcli. Offloading calculations to deterministic scripts ensures accuracy. Developers can eliminate hallucinations and create reliable, repeatable AI workflows by updating CLAUDE.md instructions to execute code instead of manual reasoning. 🧠 Opinions & Advice Anthropic made a big mistake (6 minute read) Anthropic recently made a business blunder by closing a loophole that allowed customers to use their cheaper subscription models with popular third-party coding agents like OpenCode. This move alienated many paying customers who felt they were unjustly restricted from using a service they already purchased. OpenAI capitalized on this by officially supporting its own subscriptions within these same third-party agents. The Great Filter (Or Why High Performance Still Eludes Most Dev Teams, Even With AI) (7 minute read) Despite the rise of AI-assisted coding, there's no widespread evidence of increased developer productivity or business value. DORA data shows that only already high-performing teams see benefits, while AI often slows down inefficient ones. The key differentiator for high-performing teams is addressing development process bottlenecks by adopting continuous, small-batch software work with tight feedback loops. 🚀 Launches & Tools Build API key authentication for your SaaS with Clerk (Sponsor) Step-by-step guide to adding API key support using Clerk's new public beta. Covers generating cryptographically secure keys, hashing and storing them safely, validating requests in your Next.js API routes, and building a key management UI with rotation and revocation. Full code examples included. Introducing Cowork (5 minute read) Claude Cowork is a new feature that extends Claude Code to allow anyone, not just developers, to interact with Claude by giving it direct access to files on their computer. This allows Claude to read, edit, or create files within a designated folder, completing tasks like organizing documents or drafting reports with enhanced agency. Agent of Empires (GitHub Repo) Agent of Empires is a Rust-written terminal session manager for Linux and macOS. It functions as a wrapper around tmux, creating a separate tmux session for each AI coding project and ensuring sessions persist reliably. The tool has a TUI dashboard for visual session management, including creation, attachment, detachment, deletion, and group organization. 🎁 Miscellaneous Cost of building an MVP (with AI) (7 minute read) The actual costs of building the AI-powered MVP for a new product, Lazyweb.com, was $19,100. This included a $13,000 domain name and over $3,000 spent on various AI models and services like OpenAI. The Key to Agentic Success? BASH Is All You Need (7 minute read) Minimalist AI agent architectures using simple BASH shells and modular Unix tools are proving more effective than complex, over-engineered systems. Vercel, for example, improved its internal data agent, d0, by simplifying its design to use basic BASH commands for direct file interrogation, resulting in faster, more accurate, and easier-to-manage operations. ⚡ Quick Links Manufacturing as Code is the Future, and the Future is Now (19 minute read) Traditional CAD design is inefficient due to issues with version control, collaboration, customization, and automation. Bring back opinionated architecture (8 minute read) Opinionated architecture is better than indecisive "it depends" and "just-in-case" approaches because opinionated architecture is clearer long-term. LLVM: The bad parts (20 minute read) The LLVM project has various long-standing issues like insufficient review capacity, significant code churn, lengthy build times, and fundamental IR design flaws. YAML? That's Norway problem (17 minute read) The "Norway problem" in YAML, where the country code "NO" is incorrectly parsed as `false`, comes from implicit boolean typing in older v1.1 specifications that was removed in v1.2, but remains prevalent in 2026 because many popular libraries still adhere to the older standard. 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, create your own role or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! 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