From Noise to Knowledge: An Engineer's Guide to the 'summarize' CLI

steipete/summarize

Here is a breakdown of why this tool is a gem for engineers and how you can get it running.

In our world, we are constantly bombarded with documentation, long-form technical blogs, hour-long conference talks, and dense Pull Request descriptions.

Quick Triage
Instead of watching a 40-minute keynote to find one specific update, you can get the summary in seconds.

Context Switching
When jumping into a new codebase or issue, you can quickly summarize relevant external docs or YouTube tutorials to see if they actually solve your problem.

Developer Experience (DX)
Because it’s a CLI tool built with TypeScript, it fits perfectly into our terminal-centric workflow.

Since this is a TypeScript-based CLI, you can usually run it directly or install it via npm/yarn. You'll also need an OpenAI API Key (or a similar LLM provider key) because the "magic" happens via AI.

You can install it globally to use it anywhere in your terminal

npm install -g @steipete/summarize

The tool needs to talk to a brain. Export your key in your .zshrc or .bashrc

export OPENAI_API_KEY='your_api_key_here'

The beauty of this tool is its versatility. You can point it at almost anything.

Found a long video on "Advanced Rust Patterns" but only have 5 minutes?

summarize https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=example_id

If you have a long README.md or a legal document (like a Terms of Service for a new API)

summarize ./path/to/long-document.pdf

If you prefer a UI, the project includes a Chrome Extension. Once installed, you just click the icon while on a page, and it sends the content to the summarization engine.

If you were to build a simplified version of this yourself using TypeScript, the flow would look like this

Here is a "Hello World" style example of how you might use a similar logic in a TypeScript project using LangChain or a simple OpenAI fetch

import { OpenAI } from "openai";

async function getTheGist(text: string) {
  const openai = new OpenAI();

  const response = await openai.chat.completions.create({
    model: "gpt-4",
    messages: [
      { 
        role: "system", 
        content: "You are a helpful assistant that summarizes technical content for engineers." 
      },
      { 
        role: "user", 
        content: `Please summarize the following: ${text}` 
      }
    ],
  });

  console.log("Summary:", response.choices[0].message.content);
}

The creator, Peter Steinberger (steipete), is well-known in the iOS/PDF space. The code is clean, utilizes TypeScript, and handles the "messy" parts of extraction (like pulling transcripts from YouTube) so you don't have to.

Pro Tip
Try piping the output of a command into a file if the summary is long
summarize <URL> > summary.txt