why bother

Most URL shorteners have a trust problem. You get a link and you have no idea where it goes. Clicking is a leap of faith, and half the time the base domain looks like something you’d warn a relative about. A link should tell you where you’re headed, or at least come from a domain you’d actually trust.

A small, well-made shortener is also just an easy thing to build well. There’s no excuse for a bad one. So this is me building the one I wish existed, and having fun with it: you type a link into a literal ruler, every character lands on a tick, and out comes a short code.

how it’s built

The core does one thing: redirect, instantly, every time. Nothing clever runs near that path, so if everything above it breaks, the link still works.

The web page is just one client. The real surface is a versioned REST API and an MCP server, both generated from the same schemas, so anything that speaks HTTP or MCP can create, edit, and search links.

On top of that, an agent in Slack. You ask “what’s the pitch deck link” and it answers, finding links by meaning rather than exact keywords, because nobody remembers what they titled a link three weeks ago.

Each layer is optional for the one below it. The shortener works on its own; search and the agent are extras that never get to break it.