Chrome Extensions FTW

Software is meant to solve problems and make things easier, and we are no longer beholden to app devs and SaaS companies to solve our own problems with software and do things more easily. In this new agentic age, we can eliminate little things that bug us and answer our own wishes, like “I wish it did this,” or “It would really look better like this,” and there is no better or easier way to do this than with good ol’ Google Chrome extensions.

browser-copy

In certain terminal apps I use, like herdr and Claude Code, there’s a cool feature where highlighting text copies it to your clipboard. I’m constantly highlighting text on web pages and doing cmd+c/cmd+v to paste it wherever I want to use it. One day I thought it would be really nice to have the herdr functionality in Chrome, and my next thought was “Chrome extension!”

I don’t have the prompt that I used, but it was a one-liner. Something like:

Create a chrome extension that copies whatever I highlight to the system clipboard

It was a one-shot, done in five minutes, and I use it multiple times a day.

availshare

At work I use a Chrome extension that lets you click and drag over open spots in your Google Calendar and share that availability by copying the values and pasting them into an email or elsewhere. This was cool, but I wasn’t happy with the formatting and thought, “I can do better.” So I did! I created a little extension called availshare that formats the days and times in a way that I like much better.

The best part about these Chrome extensions is that you never have to actually release them to the world. They’re YOUR little apps to do with as you please! Just go to chrome://extensions, then Load Unpacked, upload the project, and that’s it: your own app, made by you and the agent, doing exactly what you need and nothing that you don’t.