Don’t write clever code 🙅, guide to equity comp 💰, Google is winning AI 🤖

Clear, readable code is more valuable than clever code. Even though clear code might seem trivial, it's actually more difficult to write and maintain ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With  TLDR Web Dev 2025-04-14 Why Build a Notetaker Bot for Your App? This API Has Your Covered (Sponsor) A notetaker bot goes beyond transcription to generate summaries, action items, formatted notes – and (if implemented wisely) big revenue for your application. But try to create one yourself and you'll quickly find that building a bot to take the minutes can take… well, months. The Nylas Notetaker is one API for all your recording, analysis, and transcription needs. It sends meeting bots to join Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom calls, and forwards the recordings & diarized transcripts direct to your application. The results? The industry's fastest setup, highest quality, and happiest customers. Try the Nylas Notetaker API 🧑‍💻 Articles & Tutorials Advanced React in the Wild (34 minute read) Companies like Vio, DoorDash, Preply, GeekyAnts, and Inngest have tackled performance and architecture challenges in large React and Next.js apps. This post uses these companies as case studies for techniques such as optimizing Interaction to Next Paint (INP), migrating from CSR to SSR, using React Server Components, and adopting the Next.js App Router. More accurate DevTools performance debugging using real-world data (8 minute read) Chrome DevTools now includes CPU throttling calibration, allowing devs to generate accurate performance presets for low- and mid-tier mobile devices based on their own hardware. This helps simulate real-world user experiences more reliably, especially for CPU-bound tasks. DevTools also integrates field data from CrUX to suggest realistic settings and highlight mismatches between lab and real-user performance. Some Nice Things with SVG (4 minute read) This post goes over SVG animation techniques with code examples written in JSX. It shows how to create animated wires using SVG lines, masks, and CSS animations using methods like masking animated blocks. 🧠 Opinions & Advice Clever code is probably the worst code you could write (6 minute read) Clear, readable code is more valuable than clever code in the long run. Even though clear code might seem trivial, it's actually more difficult to write and maintain. Documentation is important for demonstrating the complexity of the work. A Reddit Bot Drove Me Insane (4 minute read) An AI-powered Reddit bot was faking human connection to secretly promote AI-illustrated books. It went viral because it sounded so human-like. 43 things we've learned about hiring at PostHog (5 minute read) PostHog has reviewed 30,000 applications, interviewed 2,000 candidates, and hired 65 people in a year. The best advice it has for hiring is to write job ads that actually stand out, make interview processes simpler, pay candidates for their time, be transparent about salary, and focus on culture fit over credentials. 🚀 Launches & Tools Dashboards don't fix bugs. Are your observability tools actually helping? (Sponsor) Observability tools overwhelm you with data, and at the end of the day you still don't know where your code went wrong. Instead of just showing you another graph about how something's broken, Sentry hands you real context about your code with stack traces, replays, and commits. Make sense of your code, start debugging. Fastify Vite (GitHub Repo) This Fastify plugin allows you to run Vite's development server as middleware and expose your Vite app to your Fastify application. It has configuration hooks to simplify router integration and other customizations. Expo SDK 53 beta is now available (19 minute read) Expo SDK 53 beta is now available with support for React Native 0.79 and React 19. It has the New Architecture enabled by default. Edge-to-edge display is also enabled by default for new Android projects, with plans to extend this to existing projects in SDK 54. There's also a new experimental Expo UI package for integrating Swift UI and Jetpack Compose, alongside experimental support for caching local builds for faster development. WebTUI (Website) WebTUI is a CSS library that allows devs to create visually appealing Terminal-like UIs within web browsers. 🎁 Miscellaneous Writing Cursor Rules with a Cursor Rule (16 minute read) Devs can use Cursor rules to provide LLMs with consistent project-specific instructions. The best strategy is to create a "meta-cursor rule" – a template that guides AI in generating new rules based on conversations or specific ideas. This approach makes rule creation easier and is more efficient. Essays on programming I think about a lot (13 minute read) This is an index of programming essays along with summaries of what they're about. The essays cover topics like approaches to software development, how to make technical decisions, how to succeed as an engineer at a startup, and more. Each entry in the list includes a bit about the lessons learned from the essay along with an excerpt. What are AI Agents? Why do they matter? (18 minute read) AI agents are autonomous programs that use AI models and tools to achieve specific goals through a series of interactions, unlike traditional AI models that usually have single input-output exchanges. This autonomy allows agents to understand their environment, make decisions, take actions, and maintain context over time, letting them handle complex, multi-step tasks. New standardized protocols like MCP and A2A show that agents are going to be more prominent in the future. ⚡ Quick Links Open Guide to Equity Compensation (100 minute read) The Open Guide to Equity Compensation explains the complexities of equity compensation, including stock options, restricted stock, and restricted stock units, to help employees, hiring managers, and founders make informed decisions and avoid costly mistakes in C-corps in the USA. Google Is Winning on Every AI Front (10 minute read) Google DeepMind, with its state-of-the-art models like Gemini 2.5 and its integration across Google's ecosystem, has surpassed competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic in the AI race in performance, cost-effectiveness, and hardware capabilities. ArkType (Website) ArkType is a 1:1 TypeScript validator for both editor and runtime environments. Everything Wrong with MCP (18 minute read) The Model Context Protocol (MCP), a growing standard for integrating third-party data and tools with LLM-powered chats and agents, still has some vulnerabilities and limitations in protocol security, UI/UX, and LLM security. 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 Web Dev isn't for you, please unsubscribe.