There was a time when I had dozens of browser tabs open.
All “to read later.”
Or my Read Later browser extension would be full of everything.
“Later” never really came. Between work, learning, and side projects, reading every single article I saved was impossible, no?
That’s when I found a small but useful Python script that summarizes articles using OpenAI. This was the thing.
No full-fledged app or a fancy web tool.
Just something that could take a link, extract the content, and give me a crisp summary I could read in under a minute.
And surprisingly, it turned out to be way easier than I thought.
Look, I read a lot — about data engineering, productivity, AI, and technology in general.
But every day, the backlog grew.
I realized what I needed wasn’t more time. It was a smarter way to consume information. And I thought why not let AI do it for me :)
OpenAI’s models are already great at understanding context, so why not make them do the heavy lifting?
Just drop any article link into my terminal and get a short, well-written summary within seconds. No extra steps. No browser plugins. No distractions.
Over time, I added small tweaks myself. Automatic cleanup, batching multiple articles, and storing results in Notion, but the essence stayed the same: simplicity that saves time.
But, Why Not Just Ask GPT Directly?
This is the question I get the most:
“Why not just copy-paste the article into ChatGPT and ask for a summary?”
Fair question. But here’s why I don’t.
First, GPT can’t fetch articles on its own — it doesn’t visit URLs.
If you just send a link, it won’t read it. You have to give it the raw text, which means you still need some tool to extract and clean the content.
Second, there’s the token limit.
Long articles, research papers, or multi-page blogs can easily exceed the model’s input size.
A small Python script can automatically trim, chunk, or preprocess content before sending it. Keeping things safe and efficient.
Third, automation.
Copy-pasting works for one article, but not for a week’s worth of reading.
My setup can summarize 10–15 links in a single run and even format them neatly for later reading.
In short:
These days, the summary of a lot of Medium articles also appear in my Notion, waiting for me like a personalized daily digest.
If you often feel overwhelmed by the amount of content you want to read, this is your sign to automate the boring part.
Let Open AI do the thinking.
And, Python handle the doing.
In case you read till here, this is the Github repo
In case we are meeting for the first time, come over here, it’ll be worth the roller coaster of articles that are gonna come up in the next few weeks.
Have you read this -How a Single Line of Python Code Broke Production?
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