smudge-ai

Also a Chrome extension [0]! The concept is to use the browser's context menu to run commands on the LLM, so it stays out of your way most of the time but feels like a somewhat native experience.

The stack is: 1. TypeScript/Node/tRPC/Postgres/Redis/OpenAI on the backend 2. SolidJS/Crxjs/tRPC on the front end 3. Astro for the docs/marketing site

And deployment is currently through render.com for the databases and servers, and manually via a zip file to the Chrome webstore for the extension itself.

[0] https://smudge.ai

Great points. I'm the author of a few extensions and I do agree that it's nice to see the vast majority of users end up on the same version within a day. I think a reasonable middle-ground would be for Chrome to confirm that you want to perform the update if a privacy-sensitive change is made. For example: "This extension would now also like access to X/Y/Z. Confirm update?".

Even that would only be a small step in the right direction, though, since plenty of apps already have broad enough privacy settings to inject scripts on any page with no change needed to the app manifest's permissions.

While I fully agree with the hacker ethos of this post, a major issue I have with extensions today is that they're hard to trust. Chrome updates them automatically in most cases, which means a malicious update can easily slip by undetected. There are hordes of data companies looking to buy popular extensions or pay their authors to sneak spyware or other trackers in. The risk surface is massive, which is sad because I believe extensions are also one of the best modalities for extending what people can do online.