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Can AI Copy It?

Can AI copy

Bitly

A shorter URL that redirects to a longer one, and counts who clicked.

One shot
Verdict
One shot
Time to copy
an afternoon
Category
⌁ Links & pages
Source
Proprietary

The prompt

Written to be pasted straight into an agent with no editing. It describes the whole job, including the parts that will go wrong.

Build a URL shortener. POST a long URL, get a short code; GET the code and 301 to the target. Support custom slugs with collision handling, expiry dates, and QR generation. Record clicks with timestamp, referrer, coarse geolocation and user agent class, and show them on a per-link dashboard. Run redirects at the edge with the mapping in a low-latency KV store. Screen submissions against a malware and phishing reputation API on create and rescan periodically, because you will be used for phishing on day one.
Open inClaude ↗Terminal agents take it from the clipboard.

What copies cleanly

  • The whole thing. A key-value store, a 301, and an increment.
  • Custom slugs, QR codes, click analytics by referrer and country, UTM builders.
  • This is the canonical first-week project and an agent will hand you a working one immediately.

Where it stops

  • Abuse. The moment your domain is public, phishing arrives, and a shortener with no abuse pipeline gets your domain onto blocklists within days.
  • Links are forever. Every short link you issue is a promise to keep redirecting it, and shutting down means breaking other people's content.
  • Latency at the edge, which matters because a redirect sits in front of someone else's page load.

What actually protects them

  • Trust in the domain itself, which is exactly what abuse destroys.
  • Enterprise contracts and the branded-domain business, which is where the money actually is.

Editor's note

The distance between a working shortener and a shortener you can responsibly operate is entirely made of abuse handling.

Go and look at the original

We would rather you formed your own opinion than took ours. They built the thing; we only measured it.

bitly.com ↗

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