2/26/2026 at 4:11:10 PM
It's definitely part of the SaaS-apocalypse story. LLMs shine at making little programs that integrate with an existing API to do some small task. Management has always overestimated the effort to develop that kind of thing and underestiamted the effort to develop applications with GUIs because... user interfaces are the Vietnam of computer science.The greatest danger of the current time is that the likes of Salesforce and LinkedIn who have something interesting behind an API or web site try to lock down access so instead of using competitive high-quality AI agents we're stuck with the brain damaged AI agents they want to force on us.
by PaulHoule
2/26/2026 at 4:35:03 PM
Yeah, totally agree. But I don't think they can keep it locked down any more, with the rise of computer use agents, the boundary between interfaces designed for humans and those designed for computers is becoming increasingly blurred.by niel_hu
2/26/2026 at 4:48:23 PM
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.
by PaulHoule
2/26/2026 at 5:02:54 PM
There really isn't hours worth of material to put together a browser extension. You can read all the relevant docs in tops an hour, but you can follow the MDN tutorial on it to get the "inject some Javascript into pages with a url matching this pattern" level in less than 10 minutes.by OkayPhysicist
2/26/2026 at 6:37:34 PM
Also most extensions are open sources. You can hack something from just glancing at the code of some samples.by skydhash