TikTok microdramas 📱, NYSE blockchain exchange 📈, LLMs & dev careers 👨‍💻

TikTok's new app, PineDrama, offers access to microdramas, bite-sized TV shows that can be watched in a series of one-minute episodes ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Sign Up |Advertise|View Online TLDR Together With TLDR 2026-01-20 Goodbye low test coverage and slow QA cycles (Sponsor) Bugs sneak out when less than 80% of user flows are tested before shipping. However, getting that kind of coverage (and staying there) is hard and pricey for any team. QA Wolf's AI-native solution provides high-volume, high-speed test coverage for web and mobile apps, reducing your organization's QA cycle to minutes.  They can get you: 80% automated E2E test coverage in weeks—not years Unlimited parallel test runs 24-hour maintenance and on-demand test creation Zero flakes, guaranteed The benefit? No more manual E2E testing. No more slow QA cycles. No more bugs reaching production. With QA Wolf, Drata's team of engineers achieved 4x more test cases and 86% faster QA cycles. Get Started For Free 📱 Big Tech & Startups TikTok quietly launches a microdrama app called 'PineDrama' (2 minute read) TikTok's new app, PineDrama, offers access to microdramas, bite-sized TV shows that can be watched in a series of one-minute episodes. It features a variety of genres, including thriller, romance, and family. The microdrama industry is projected to bring in $26 billion in annual revenue by 2030. PineDrama will compete with existing microdrama platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox. OpenAI teases hardware unveil this year as Jony Ive's team hires more Apple alumni (1 minute read) OpenAI is on track to unveil its first hardware product in the second half of 2026. Jony Ive's 'io' team at OpenAI recently hired Janum Trivedi, who previously worked on SpringBoard at Apple. Trivedi also built Split View, Multitasking Drag & Drop, iPad Pointer Gestures, and more for iPadOS 15. 🚀 Science & Futuristic Technology The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff (9 minute read) NASA rolled out the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad over the weekend. The Artemis II mission will set several notable spaceflight records. The astronauts will travel further from the Earth than any human in history, flying to the far side of the Moon and back. The mission is on track for liftoff as soon as next month. A Matic Home Story (16 minute read) Matic's robots have cleaned over 50 million square feet across real homes since launch. The company was designed from the ground up to iterate quickly. It shipped early, observed behavior, learned from real homes, and refined constantly. This article tells the story of Matic's founders and how they built the company. 💻 Programming, Design & Data Science Want to ship AI agents with built-in auth and security? (Sponsor) Connect your AI agents to apps and data more securely, give users control over the actions AI agents can perform and the data they can access, and enable human confirmation for critical agent actions.  Start building with Auth0 today. LLMs and your career (3 minute read) Interesting software development jobs aren't likely to disappear. The jobs that are dependent on the fundamentals of software aren't going to stop being dependent on the fundamentals of software. More LLM usage will mean more stress on the tools and applications that rely on the fundamentals of software. The most conservative way to build a career as a software developer is to be practical and effective at problem-solving and to better understand over time how the tools you use work so that you can make better decisions. I was a top 0.01% Cursor user. Here's why I switched to Claude Code 2.0 (32 minute read) Claude Code 2.0 has a flexible and robust harness with an evolved UX and fewer bugs. The RLHF Anthropic did on Opus 4.5 completely changed the equation. Users no longer need to review code or instruct the model at the level of files or functions: they can just test behaviors instead. Claude Code can be used by developers who never plan on learning how to code and just care about outputs. 🎁 Miscellaneous NYSE Builds Venue for 24/7 Trading of Tokenized Stocks, ETFs (5 minute read) The New York Stock Exchange is building a new digital trading platform using blockchain technology to allow for around-the-clock trading of tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds. The platform will launch later this year, pending regulatory approval. It will allow for new types of investor accessibility and create new opportunities for retail to participate in stablecoin-funded markets. The digital infrastructure will allow trades to be funded and settled in real-time without the current one-day delay. All Bets Are On: The Rise of Prediction Markets (10 minute read) Nearly $12 billion was traded on Kalshi and Polymarket in December, up more than 400% from a year earlier. The rise of prediction markets has created new risks and raised fears about the spread of gambling. There are also concerns about market manipulation and insider trading. Proponents of prediction markets claim that the platforms are fundamentally different from gambling and that they offer a valuable new source of information by allowing people to bet on world events. ⚡ Quick Links New Forrester study: Fragmentation is killing AI ROI (Sponsor) 75% of leaders believe that AI is overly focused on individual productivity, creating siloes and hurting collaboration. What's the alternative? Get a free copy of the study from Miro Model-Market Fit (15 minute read) No amount of brilliant UX, go-to-market strategy, or engineering can make customers adopt a product whose core AI task doesn't solve their job to be done. Ask HN: COBOL devs, how is AI coding affecting your work? (Hacker News Thread) AI isn't competent enough yet to program in COBOL, and keeping code compliant remains a tough challenge. Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and search results (1 minute read) A recent change removes the blue background around sponsored results. TLDR is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI ($200k-$300k, Fully Remote) As the first engineer on TLDR's new Applied AI team, you'll build AI agents and composable Claude Skills to let non-technical teammates create their own AI workflows. Learn more. Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane? (12 minute read) AI agents are massive slop machines if you turn off your brain and let go immediately. Palmer Luckey: Meta Isn't Abandoning VR, Studio Closures "A Good Thing" (6 minute read) Oculus founder Palmer Luckey says Meta was crowding out the ecosystem and that recent studio shutdowns and layoffs will be a good thing for the long-term health of the VR industry. Amazon is ending all inventory commingling as of March 31, 2026 (1 minute read) The change will reduce the chance of customers getting counterfeits from Amazon when buying from a reliable seller. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/7c97ce4b/ Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of tech executives, decision-makers and engineers, 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! TLDR is one of Inc.'s Best Bootstrapped businesses of 2025. If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Dan Ni & Stephen Flanders Manage your subscriptions to our other newsletters on tech, startups, and programming. Or if TLDR isn't for you, please unsubscribe.