Show HN: I wrote a browser AI assistant without requiring login | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I wrote a browser AI assistant without requiring login

sumbuddy.app

24 pointsdjyde11 comments

For those that don't know, Firefox already has a built in AI assistant that you can use with your own models or point to external models

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot

It's a great product overall! However, as others have mentioned, if it can't be open source and requires granting strong permissions, I'm concerned about the security implications.

Any plans to open source it?

Sorry, no. I'm an indie developer so I wish I can make some money with it. It would be a fair price as I wrote on landing page, will less than $20/year.

But I can share the tech stack I use:

- WXT: the browser extension framework

- Vercel AI SDK. Both SDK core and SDK UI. I wrote a bridge that I can proxy the api request to background script which compat with the SDK streaming protocol, so that I can use the SDK UI.

- Next.js: for the landing page and the up coming cloud service (e.g. prompt sync)

- Strapi: headless cms.

Fair enough. I asked because an extension like this has access to too much information which I don't like from a privacy stand point.

Thanks for sharing though!

I understand your concern. I think "access to much information" means this extension require <all_url> host_permission, which I don't want to either but it must.

Because custom AI provider's API base url is submit by user. If I want to call the API on background script, this base url must be listed on host_permissions. Otherwise it will cause a CORS problem.

optional_host_permissions may fix this problem, but since the base url is set by user, it's not possible to use this workaround.

Any suggestion?

you could give paying customers access to the code to run themselves (not open source)

if that works for you/your privacy-aware customer they can inspect the code/build it/ run their own version

Actually, the nice thing about chrome extensions is that users can view all requests made by content_script and background script through devtool. This is much more intuitive than checking the code.

>will less than $20/year.

I'd rather pay more, once, than another* subscription.

*Of which, I have reduced to two: phone plan [€5.99pcm], and mullvad [€5.00pcm].

No more.

Hi hackers. I wrote an AI browser extension for chat with page.

I know there are many existing tools like this. But every existed tools require me login before using it and I must use their AI models (which is the way they make money).

So I write my own tools for it. The key features are:

- No need to login, just use it

- Use your own AI API key

- Use your own custom prompt

- Chat run entirely within the browser, without passing through any third-party servers

It looks good

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