Andy Jassy took the role of Amazon's CEO five years ago. He recently
placed a series of expensive bets on AI that are audacious ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 


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TLDR

TOGETHER WITH [SerpApi] [4]

TLDR 2026-05-18

GIVE ANY AI AGENT ACCESS TO GOOGLE SEARCH WITH SERPAPI -- SPECIAL
OFFER FOR TLDR (SPONSOR) [4]

Agents are smarter when they can search the web. But Google doesn't
offer an API for web search results... so how are AI companies doing
it?

Meet the worst-kept secret in the AI industry: the SerpApi web search
API [4]:

👉 Scrape Google and other search engines (including AI overviews,
Maps, Local, Shopping, and Knowledge Graph)

👉 Integrate with a dead-simple GET request that any agent can make.

👉 Used by Perplexity, NVIDIA, Uber, Adobe, and even the United
Nations.

Special offer for TLDR: Reach out via chat/email to claim 3 months at
50% discount [4] (for new customers), or start with 250 free
credits/month [4]

📱

BIG TECH & STARTUPS

ANDY JASSY IS REWRITING AMAZON'S PLAYBOOK FOR THE AI AGE (30 MINUTE
READ) [5]

Andy Jassy took the role of Amazon's CEO five years ago. He recently
placed a series of expensive bets on AI that are audacious even by
Silicon Valley standards. In his time, he has killed projects and cut
staff, pleasing Wall Street, and now he has to steer the tech giant
through its greatest challenge yet. This article tells the story of
Jassy's tenure at Amazon.

FOR SPACEX, THE STAKES OF THIS WEEK'S STARSHIP ROCKET TEST FLIGHT ARE
SKY-HIGH (5 MINUTE READ) [6]

SpaceX plans to launch the newest version of its Starship rocket on
Tuesday during a launch window that opens at 6:30 PM ET. The flight
plan will be similar to previous Starship test launches. The most
recent test flight was seven months ago. Starship has undergone major
redesigns and is now bigger, more powerful, and a step closer to being
fully reusable.

🚀

SCIENCE & FUTURISTIC TECHNOLOGY

A REVOLUTIONARY CANCER TREATMENT COULD TRANSFORM AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE
(15 MINUTE READ) [7]

CAR T cell therapy was originally designed to target and wipe out
cancer by reprogramming patients' immune cells. It is now being
offered to patients in clinical trials for autoimmune conditions.
There's still uncertainty about how well the treatment works for
autoimmunity and how any benefits might last, as well as what
long-term side effects might arise. Another major challenge is that
the therapy can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars after accounting
for hospital stays, cell engineering, and other expenses.

RUBIN TRACKS SKYSCRAPER-SIZE ASTEROIDS, FAILED SUPERNOVAS, AND
INTERSTELLAR VISITORS (12 MINUTE READ) [8]

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is designed to study the universe in
greater detail than ever before. It is expected to discover a million asteroids, thousands of comets, and billions of stars and galaxies in
its first year alone. The facility has begun collecting preliminary
images and astronomers are poring over the initial data. Scientists
have already been able to make new discoveries with its first images
despite the images still not being as sharp as expected and the
observatory still requiring a final tuning.

💻

PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

YOUR API LATENCY BENCHMARK IS LYING TO YOU (SPONSOR) [9]

P50 response time tells you almost nothing about performance. The
metric that actually matters [9] has to account for recall, grounding
rate, re-query rate, and integration overhead. Fast-and-wrong is
slower than you think. Read the full breakdown from You.com [9]

ZERO (GITHUB REPO) [10]

Zero is a systems programming language for agents that provides small
native tools, explicit effects, predictable memory, and structured
compiler output. The language is still experimental and not stable
yet, but it is in a stage where users can try it out and provide
feedback. Practical examples are available for users to learn the
language with.

HOW I USE LLMS AS A STAFF ENGINEER IN 2026 (11 MINUTE READ) [11]

Agents have gotten really good in the last fifteen months. They can
now be used for real work with light supervision. AI can now be used
for writing code changes, investigating and fixing bugs, research in
large code bases, manual testing, and more. It still isn't suitable
for writing public communications, unreviewed code, or testing UIs,
but its capabilities are improving quickly.

🎁

MISCELLANEOUS

HOW TO ENTER SIDE DOORS (17 MINUTE READ) [12]

Many people try to gain employment through the front door: they find
a job advertisement, send their resume, and hope that someone on the
other side notices them. Most people don't realize there are other
entrances into the building. Conversations at parties, warm
introductions, cold emails, and visible proof of work are viable
alternatives. Sometimes, it's about creating a signal that attracts
the exact person who needs it.

THE SIGMOIDS WON'T SAVE YOU (8 MINUTE READ) [13]

The idea that all exponentials eventually become sigmoids might not
be necessarily true for AI. There are several examples of exponentials
that don't end up becoming sigmoids (or haven't yet), for example, the
decline in birth rates or solar power deployment. Things that are
currently happening are more likely to continue happening than not. AI
is unlikely to stop progressing on all fronts anytime soon.

⚡

QUICK LINKS

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TLDR is hiring a VP of Marketing to scale growth, pipeline, and brand
across 8M+ subscribers, 13 newsletters, and advertisers like AWS,
Google Cloud, Microsoft, and Anthropic. Apply here [15].

AGENT HOOKS: DETERMINISTIC CONTROL FOR AGENT WORKFLOWS (18 MINUTE
READ) [16]

Hooks make agent workflows more dependable by implementing tests,
policies, logs, and completion gates as deterministic parts of the
workflow.

GIT IS NOT FINE (13 MINUTE READ) [17]

Git has been behind the state of the art for a while now, prompting
companies like Meta to develop better in-house systems.

UBER TURNS ON WAYMO AS IT POURS $10B+ INTO OWNING ROBOTAXI
ALTERNATIVES (5 MINUTE READ) [18]

Waymo's rapid scaling to 400,000 rides per week proved that AV
operators might not need Uber at all, so Uber is pivoting to asset
ownership to avoid being cut out entirely.

PER-USER PRICING DOESN'T WORK FOR EMBEDDED ANALYTICS (SPONSOR) [19]

The more your product succeeds, the more the invoice hurts? Not
anymore. Reveal is the embedded analytics SDK with flat pricing,
predictable costs, and AI that drives better engagement. See how [20]

DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE IS THE LEVERAGE (3 MINUTE READ) [21]

It is becoming apparent that understanding the domain and how it
connects to the program is valuable, which is why spec-driven
development is now in the spotlight.

NATIVE ALL THE WAY, UNTIL YOU NEED TEXT (3 MINUTE READ) [22]

SwiftUI & Apple's native SDKs are constraints when it comes to
building rich text rendering for long-form chats.

I STRONGLY BELIEVE THERE ARE ENTIRE COMPANIES RIGHT NOW UNDER HEAVY
AI PSYCHOSIS (2 MINUTE READ) [23]

Changes are happening so fast that nobody is noticing the underlying architecture decaying, and people are denying that this is an issue
because they are focusing on the wrong metrics.

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If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email!

Thanks for reading,
Dan Ni [30] & Stephen Flanders [31]

Manage your subscriptions [32] to our other newsletters on tech,
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Links:
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[1] https://tldr.tech/signup?utm_source=tldr
[2] https://advertise.tldr.tech/?utm_source=tldr&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=advertisetopnav
[3] https://a.tldrnewsletter.com/web-version?ep=1&lc=265280dc-d4e0-11f0-a661-1b9fa34a893d&p=c7e2658a-5289-11f1-a369-a9f237e17c00&pt=campaign&t=1779099950&s=260dc734cde63996c0991cc842dd31d204e63d74bda631d34138163aec5296d4
[4] https://serpapi.com/?utm_source=tldr_newsletter
[5] https://links.tldrnewsletter.com/utfJ7P
[6] https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/spacex-starship-rocket-test-flight-high-stakes-rcna343891?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[7] https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/a-revolutionary-cancer-treatment-could-transform-autoimmune-disease/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[8] https://www.quantamagazine.org/rubin-tracks-skyscraper-size-asteroids-failed-supernovas-and-interstellar-visitors-20260515/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[9] https://you.com/resources/why-api-latency-alone-is-a-misleading-metric-download?utm_campaign=34319961-TLDR_tech_Q1&utm_source=external-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=tldr_secondary_5.18&utm_content=tldr_secondary_5.18
[10] https://github.com/vercel-labs/zero?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[11] https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-i-use-llms-in-2026/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[12] https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/how-to-enter-side-doors?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[13] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-sigmoids-wont-save-you?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[14] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tldr.tech/9a1d9022-357b-4774-86b2-468e8b3665c5?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[15] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tldr.tech/9a1d9022-357b-4774-86b2-468e8b3665c5 [16] https://nader.substack.com/p/agent-hooks-deterministic-control?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[17] https://www.billjings.com/posts/title/git-is-not-fine/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[18] https://electrek.co/2026/05/15/uber-turns-on-waymo-10-billion-robotaxi-alternatives/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[19] https://www.revealbi.io?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[20] https://www.revealbi.io
[21] https://log.beshr.com/domain-knowledge-is-the-leverage/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[22] https://justsitandgrin.im/posts/native-all-the-way-until-you-need-text/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[23] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2055380239711457578.html?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
[24] https://refer.tldr.tech/66662a80/
[25] https://hub.sparklp.co/sub_e87ba9c7d7c0/1
[26] https://advertise.tldr.tech/?utm_source=tldr&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=advertisecta
[27] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tldr.tech
[28] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tldr.tech/c227b917-a6a4-40ce-8950-d3e165357871 [29] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7401699691039830016/ [30] https://twitter.com/tldrdan
[31] https://twitter.com/SteveFlanders22
[32] https://tldr.tech/tech/manage?email=tldrnewsletter%40synchro.net
[33] https://a.tldrnewsletter.com/unsubscribe?ep=1&l=cfa2d55a-b7be-11e8-a3c9-06b79b628af2&lc=265280dc-d4e0-11f0-a661-1b9fa34a893d&p=c7e2658a-5289-11f1-a369-a9f237e17c00&pt=campaign&pv=4&spa=1779098444&t=1779099950&s=2856b3735e8a7964c11403e59f8553406617978d241b4d7ebb706384da74f497

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