Thanks but no thanks.

You don't de-encode.

Telling me to install an extension without ever telling me what that extension actually does is the most rookie move ever!

I think it's better to use Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey. Rules are deterministic, you have full control, and you don't have to worry about monetization or malicious data collection in the future.

There have been multiple incidents in the past of extensions like these being sold off to sketchy third party companies which then use the popularity to insert malware into folks' machines.

I really recommend against this. The AI spin doesn't add much since most sites have had rules that work for years, they don't change that often. Please don't build up this type of dependence on a company for regular browsing.

Power users already know about customizing the Web with greasemonkey and those who don't really don't know why they would want this. It's trying to be all things to all people - it's an everything extension. You need to make this work BETTER than the free tools. And this is before even thinking about the legal grey area of modifying websites and then sharing modifications to those websites.

Some questions:

[Tech]

1. How deep does the modification go? If I request a tweek to the YouTube homepage, do I need to re-specify or reload the tweek to have it persist across the entire site (deeply nested pages, iframes, etc.)

2. What is your test and eval setup? How confident are you that the model is performing the requested change without being overly aggressive and eliminating important content?

3. What is your upkeep strategy? How will you ensure that your system continues to WAI after site owners update their content in potentially adversarial ways? In my experience LLMs do a fairly poor job at website understanding when the original author is intentionally trying to mess with the model, or has overly complex CSS and JS.

4. Can I prompt changes that I want to see globally applied across all sites (or a category of sites)? For example, I may want a persistent toolbar for quick actions across all pages -- essentially becoming a generic extension builder.

[Privacy]

5. Where and how are results being cached? For example, if I apply tweeks to a banking website, what content is being scraped and sent to an LLM? When I reload a site, is content being pulled purely from a local cache on my machine?

[Business]

6. Is this (or will it be) open source? IMO a large component of empowering the user against enshittification is open source. As compute commoditizes it will likely be open source that is the best hope for protection against the overlords.

7. What is your revenue model? If your product essentially wrestles control from site owners and reduces their optionality for revenue, your arbitrage is likely to be equal or less than the sum of site owners' loss (a potentially massive amount to be sure). It's unclear to me how you'd capture this value though, if open source.

8. Interested in the cost and latency. If this essentially requires an LLM call for every website I visit, this will start to add up. Also curious if this means that my cost will scale with the efficiency of the sites I visit (i.e. do my costs scale with the size of the site's content).

Very cool.

Cheers

I know linguistics is descriptive not prescriptive, but it's truly amazing to me the lengths people will go to swear.