Last year I was talking with somebody about business plans and we were talking about using browser extensions for social news applications to get around paywall

Last year I was talking with somebody about business plans and we were talking about using browser extensions for social news applications to get around paywalls, another part of the "lockdown economy". I have an "image sorter" that ingests image galleries, it used to use a bookmarklet that cued a webcrawler but after a decade of having my time as a user wasted clicking on those Cloudflare thingies I finally had it get in the way of my webcrawler. I was talking about options w/ Junie and it suggested, "why not write a browser extension?" and I'm like "is that hard?" and it says "no" and 20 minutes later I have a prototype browser extension. So that plug-in you're talking about where an AI can see directly into your browser is another option, another is vibe-coding a custom browser extension. I think it was always pretty easy to write a browser extension but I had I done it myself my usual scholarly way I'd spend a few hours reading documentation before I started coding and never realized just how simple it is... Just the way people are discovering web crawlers and API integrations are easier than they thought.