Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web
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excited
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browser extensions
user customization
web development
The modern web is so full of clutter and junk (banners, modals, feeds, and recommendations you didn’t ask for). Even a simple google search is guarded by multiple ads, an AI overview, a trending searches module, etc. before you even see the first real blue link.
Every day there's a new Lovable-like product (make it simple to build your own website/app) or a new agentic browser (AI agents click around and browse the web for you), but we built Tweeks to serve the middle ground: most of our time spent on the web is on someone else's site (not our own), and we don't want to offload everything to an agentic browser. We want to be able to shape the entire web to our own preferences as we browse.
I spent years working on recommendation systems and relevance at Pinterest, and understand how well-meaning recommendations and A/B tests can lead to website enshittification. No one sets out to make UX worse, but optimizing for an “average” user is not the same as optimizing for each individual user.
I’ve also been hacking “page fixers” as long as I can remember: remove a login wall here, collapse cookie banners there, add missing filters/highlights (first with F12/inspect element and eventually graduated to advanced GreaseMonkey userscripts). Tweeks started as a weekend prototype that turned simple requests into page edits but unexpectedly grew into something people kept asking to share. We hope you’ll like it too!
How it works: Open the Tweeks extension, type your request (e.g. “hide cookie banners and add a price/quality score”), and submit. Upon submission, the page structure is captured, an AI agent reviews the structure, plans changes, and returns deterministic transformations (selectors, layout tweaks, styles, and small scripts) that run locally. Your modifications persist across page loads and can be enabled/disabled, modified, and shared.
Here are a bunch of one‑shot examples from early users:
Youtube: Remove Youtube Shorts. Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aL7i89BdO9o. Try it yourself: http://tweeks.io/share/script/bcd8bc32b8034b79a78a8564
Hacker News: Filter posts by title/url or points/comments, modify header and text size. Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=cD5Ei8bMmUk. Try it yourself: http://tweeks.io/share/script/97e72c6de5c14906a1351abd (filter), http://tweeks.io/share/script/6f51f96c877a4998bda8e781 (header + text).
LinkedIn: Keep track of cool people (extracts author data and send a POST request to a server). Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WDO4DRXQoTU
Reddit: Remove sidebar and add a countdown timer that shows a blocking modal when time is up. Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=kBIkQ9j_u94. Try it yourself: http://tweeks.io/share/script/e1daa0c5edd441dca5a150c8 (sidebar), http://tweeks.io/share/script/c321c9b6018a4221bd06fdab (timer).
New York Times Games: Add a Strands helper that finds all possible words. Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=hJ75jSATg3Q. Try it yourself: http://tweeks.io/share/script/7a955c910812467eaa36f569
Theming: Retheme Google to be a 1970s CLI terminal. Demo: http://youtube.com/shorts/V-CG5CbYJb4 (oops sorry a youtube short snuck back in there). Try it yourself: http://tweeks.io/share/script/8c8c0953f6984163922c4da7.
We just opened access at https://tweeks.io. It’s currently free, but each use costs tokens so we'll likely need to cap usage to prevent abuse. We're more interested in early feedback than your money, so if you manage to hit the cap, message us at contact@trynextbyte.com or https://discord.gg/WucN6wpJw2, tell us how you're using it/what features you want next, and we'll happily reset it for you.
Btw if you do anything interesting with it, feel free to make a shareable link (go to ‘Library’ and press ‘share’ after generating) and include it in the comments below. It’s fun to see the different things people are coming up with!
We're rapidly shipping improvements and would love your feedback and comments. Thanks for reading!
Tweeks is a browser extension that allows users to modify websites using natural language, aiming to 'deshittify' the web by removing clutter and junk.
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- 01Story posted
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I actually like the idea, not sure about monetization.
It also requires access to all the data?? And it's not even open source.
To be fair, we're not sure about monetization either :) We just had a lot of fun building it and have enjoyed seeing what people make with it.
> It also requires access to all the data??
Think of us like Tampermonkey/some other userscript manager. The scripts you run have to go through our script engine. That means that any data/permission your script needs access to, our script needs access to. We do try to make the scripting transparent. If you're familiar with the Greasemonkey API, we show you which permissions a given script requests (e.g. here https://www.tweeks.io/share/script/d856f07a2cb843c5bfa1b455, requires GM_addStyle)
Web extensions API is emerging and a lot of it is already somewhat standardized https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
Just some different fields in the manifest, and there are specifics that work completely different or are not available (for example favicons).
I have tried Chrome -> Firefox before and it was surprisingly easy. Safari is more difficult in my experience, it's missing complete API's like the bookmarks one.
These changes are the reason many of the existing userscript managers stopped working/being developed after MV3 went live. It is a real pain in the butt and unfortunately the functionality is not exactly the same between chrome and the generic browser API that firefox uses. There are a lot of edge cases that make everything even more of a pain.
Life would be much better (in many ways) if chrome didn't force MV3 down our throats.
User owned and controlled inference in their compute context is what beats enshittification, it is equalizing Big Tech power asymmetry against users, or at least keeps it in check. And so, I wish this team much luck, and await their results from their experiment. Many thanks to YC for funding them.
I'm honestly not certain myself how we'll monetize this, but I have had a lot of fun building it and using it myself, and seeing how others use it. As you said, if we continue down this path without success, then worst case, what we built will still exist.
Re: local models, I am a big proponent, but they aren't there yet. This task is non-trivial. Try taking raw HTML from a webpage (minified, bundled, abstracted variable names, no comments, etc.) and using it as a basis to make useful edits. It's tough, and very impressive that any model can actually do it reasonably well. It tentatively looks like we're starting to reach a plateau for general models and open-weight is catching up, but I know the big labs/companies are aggressively capturing massive data and squeezing everything they can out of RL for more task-specific tuning. I hope open-weights can continue to compete!
> Think of us like Tampermonkey/some other userscript manager. The scripts you run have to go through our script engine. That means that any data/permission your script needs access to, our extension needs to have.
> We do try to make the scripting transparent. If you're familiar with the Greasemonkey API, we show you which permissions a given script requests (e.g. here https://www.tweeks.io/share/script/d856f07a2cb843c5bfa1b455, requires GM_addStyle)
So the permissions are either to 1) enable you to run scripts that can do many powerful things or 2) allow us to capture your active tab content if and only if you make a generation request (no passive logging).
And if you don't want to use AI and just want to install other's scripts (with no sign up required), that is also totally valid and supported
For example:
Hate Google AI overviews? Delete them.
Tired of the slop on YouTube Shorts? Block shorts altogether.
Tired of going to a recipe site to find a simple recipe and getting hit with 1000+ trackers, more ads that you can imagine, and having to scroll 75% down the page to actually see the ingredients + recipe? Filter out the junk.
The potential is only limited by your creativity (and our models, but they're hopefully getting better everyday!)
Edit: The site is an entangled mess of state machine and I don't want to break anything right now (+ I'm trying to keep up with all the comments + traffic) so I can just put it here for now: https://www.tweeks.io/privacy
We care a lot about privacy and tried to keep everything as minimal as possible. Definitely open to feedback here!
Sure.
Know your audience. HN users are going to be focused on two things: how the your browers data is used and how you stop an agent from taking account numbers, inputted passwords, etc.
From the linked privacy policy:
> Share data with third parties except our API service > When you use our script generation functionality:
> Generated Code: We retain rights to use, modify, distribute, and commercialize any scripts generated by our service
> Sharing Rights: Generated scripts may be used to improve our services, shared as examples, or incorporated into our script library
Also, I would encourage you to understand your technology, even your marketing site, to be able to add a link to Privacy Policy and ToS in the footer without the burden of "an entangled mess of state machine" and the risk of breaking anything. If the marketing site technology is outside the scope of your expertise, consider how much worse would a static page would be?
> Instead of digging through selectors and hand‑writing custom JS/CSS
Some of us like that or at least the exact control it gives us Vs installing an extension that has access to my entire browser infrastructure and those terms.
I suspect many HN readers aren't the target market for this.
I enjoy having control over my browser, as well. So much so that I built an extension that could help me with it :)
I didn't build this so I could make money, it was a side project that I tinkered with (after YC). I shared it with a few friends, they thought it was cool, their friends also thought it was cool, and it grew from there.
It's okay that many in the HN audience don't necessarily resonate with "Instead of digging through selectors and hand‑writing custom JS/CSS". At the very least, hopefully I inspired someone else to play with this idea. I personally think it is very cool and beneficial for the web!
We have standard data processing agreements with any and all LLM providers that we use. These include do not train/retain provisions (whether you trust them is another question entirely).
> Anything you make is or can become public. I would revisit this decision and prioritize keeping users' data private.
Totally valid. We haven't acted on this clause (scripts are not shared unless your yourself enable sharing) so probably best to remove it. To be clear though, your page data is your own. That will never be shared (not even you yourself can opt to share that because the privacy concerns are too great). The generated scripts are much safer (generally boils down to a bunch of static CSS selectors, styles, etc.). Nonetheless, a valid point.
> Also, I would encourage you to understand your technology, even your marketing site, to be able to add a link to Privacy Policy and ToS in the footer without the burden of "an entangled mess of state machine" and the risk of breaking anything. If the marketing site technology is outside the scope of your expertise, consider how much worse would a static page would be?
Fair comment, fwiw we did ship it in the footer already :) For the standard site, when the extension is installed, there are 6 steps. Each step dynamically progresses based on your install state (installed, pinned, permissions granted, first generation, etc.) We put a lot into the onboarding experience and it is pretty complicated (happy to geek out over the details!), but we hide all this if the extension isn't actively installed. Unfortunately, my blunder was that one of those steps that was hidden includes the privacy policy.
Thanks for all the feedback!
In order for us to be able to execute your scripts that do powerful things (send notifications, save to local storage, download things, etc.), our extension needs to have those permissions itself. Google doesn't have any way for us to say our extension itself only requires permissions x, y, z but give this user script permissions j, k, l.
Your browsing/page data is yours. That data is only accessed when you explicitly request to generate a script (i.e. can't generate a script to modify a page without seeing that page).
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot more iterations of tool + prompt + agent flow updates we can and will do to make things even better, and the models will keep getting better themselves, but the task is non-trivial. If you download the raw HTML of a webpage, it's a messy jungle, and frankly impressive that the models are capable of doing anything useful with it
You don't de-encode.
The limitation here is that the AI agent sees your page once and has to write a static script that applies generically.
What you're requesting would require an LLM call on every page request dynamically (rather than a static generated script) to categorize the content. It is possible and something we want to achieve, but we're not there quite yet.
Telling me to install an extension without ever telling me what that extension actually does is the most rookie move ever!
We definitely could invest more in a flashy landing page, but we're early, and we've focused more on trying to build a product that is useful than one that is well-marketed. For Silicon Valley, we have our priorities reversed, but I enjoy the product building :)
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.
The VCs didn't fund us for this, we pivoted. (shhh don't tell them (edit: /s))
> 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.
When you do a generation, the result is a deterministic script. You can even go to the options page and read the code for it yourself. From my experience though, writing a GM script from scratch is a massive pain. We just make that much more accessible.
> 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.
You're not wrong that rules can be robust. However, this extension has enabled me to build helpers that I never would have thought to implement by hand. E.g. on this page "highlight threads where jmadeano has not replied" -> super useful if I can generate it in a few seconds but a huge waste of time if I had to implement it myself.
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.
Totally hear you on the permissions/access, and there isn't really a workaround:
In order for us to be able to execute your scripts that do powerful things (send notifications, save to local storage, download things, etc.), our extension needs to have those permissions itself.
I started off doing the same as you, having GPT to write scripts for me, and you can go a long way with that. I personally ran into the ceiling and felt I could build out a more robust solution, but it serves your needs well, by all means
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
If you're familiar with Greasemonkey, we work similar to the @match metadata. A given script could have a specific domain like (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD5Ei8bMmUk) or all videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch*) or all of youtube (https://www.youtube.com/*) or all domains (https:///). During generation, we try to infer your intent based on your request (and you can also manually override with a dropdown.
> 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?
Oh boy, don't get me started. We have not found a way to automate eval yet. We can automate "is there an error?", "does it target the right selectors", etc. But the request are open ended so there are 1M "correct" answers. We have a growing set of "tough" requests and when we are shipping a major change, we sit down, generate them all, and click through and manually check pass/fail. We built tooling around this so it is actually pretty quick but definitely thinking about better automation.
This is also where more users comes in. Hopefully you complain to us if it doesn't work and we get a better sense of what to improve!
> 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.
Great question. The good news is that there are things like aria labels that are pretty consistent. If the model picks the right selectors, it can be pretty robust to change. Beyond that, hopefully it is as easy as one update request ("this script doesn't work anymore, please update the selectors"). Though we can't really expect each user to do that, so we are thinking of an update system where e.g. if you install/copy script A, and then the original script A is updated, you can pull that new update. The final stage of this is an intelligent system where the script can heals itself (every so often, it assess the site, sees if selectors have changed and fixes itself) -> that is more long-term.
> 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. Yes, if domain is https:/// it applies to all sites so you can think of this as a meta-extension builder. E.g. I have a timer script that applies across reddit, linkedin, twitter, etc. and keeps me focused.
> 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?
There is a distinction. When you generate a tweek, the page is captured and sent to an LLM. There is no way around this. You can't generate a modification for a site you cannot see.
The result of a generation is a static script that applies to the page across reloads (unless you disable it). When you apply a tweek, everything is local, there is no dynamic server communication.
Hopefully that is all helpful! I need to get to other replies, but I will try to return to finish up your business questions (those are the most boring anyway)
-- Edit: I'm back! --
> 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.
It is very important to me that people trust us. I can say that we don't do X, Y, Z with your data and that using our product is safe, but trust is not freely given (nor should it be). We have a privacy policy, we have SOC II, and in theory, you could even download the extension and dig into the code yourself.
Open-source is one way to build trust. However, I also recognize that many of these "overlords" you speak of are happy to abuse their power. Who's to say that we don't open our code, only to have e.g. OpenAI fork it for their own browser? Of course, we could put restrictive licenses, but lawsuits haven't been particularly protective of copyright lately. I am interested in open-sourcing parts of our code (and there certainly is hunger for it in this post), but I am cognizant that there is a lot that goes into that decision.
> 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.
The honest answer is TBD. I would push back on your claim that we wrestle control from site owners and reduce their optionality for revenue. While there likely will be users who say "hide this ad" (costing the site revenue) there are also users who say "move this sidbebar from left to right" or "I use {x} button all the time but it is hidden three menus in, place it prominently for easy access". I'd argue the latter cases are not negative for the site owners, they could be positive sum. Maybe we even see a trend that 80% of users make this UX modification on Z site. We could go to Z site and say, "Hey, you could probably make your users happy if you made this change". Maybe they'd even pay us for that insight?
Again, the honest answer is that I'm not certain about the business model. I am a lover of positive sum games. And in the moment, I am building something that I enjoy using and hopefully also provides value to others.
> 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).
As I noted above, this does not require an LLM call for every website you visit. You are correct that that would bankrupt us very quickly! An LLM is only involved when you actively start a generation/update request. There is still a cost and it does scale with the complexity of the site/request, but it is infinitely more feasible than running on every site.
In the future, we may extend functionality so that the core script that is generated can itself dynamically call LLMs on new page loads. That would enable you to do things like "filter political content from my feed" which requires test time LLM compute to dynamically categorize on each load (can't be hard-coded in a once-generated static script). That would likely have to be done locally (e.g. Google actually packages Gemini nano into the browser) for both cost and latency reasons. We're not there yet, and there is a lot you can do with the extension today, but there are definitely opportunities to build really cool stuff, way beyond Greasemonkey.
Wow, you really put me to work with this comment. Appreciate all the great questions!
Yeah. If they have a problem with that, they can kill HN. You can't have hackers/smart people in your forum and decide what they will do. Moderation can try do guide it but there is a limit when meeting smart + polite people.
> how much effort did you put in to acquire it, and what made you decide to pursue it?
We originally started looking into it when we were in the B2B space. On our end, we already took security pretty seriously so checking all the boxes was low lift.
My honest opinion:
1. No site would pay for that insight
2. Every site should pay for that insight
Part of the problem is that a lot of companies fall into one of two categories:
1. Small companies that don't have the time/energy/inclination to make changes, even if they're simple; often they're not even the ones making the website itself and they aren't going to way to pay the company who made the site originally to come back and tweak it based on what a small, self-selecting group of users decided to change.
2. Large companies who, even if they did care about what that small, self-selecting group of users wanted to change, have so many layers between A and Z that it's nearly impossible to get anything done without a tangible business need. No manager is going to sign off on developer and engineer time and testing because 40% of 1% of their audience moves the sidebar from one side to the other.
Also:
1. Designers are opinionated and don't want some clanker telling them what they're doing wrong, regardless of the data.
2. Your subset of users may have different goals or values; maybe the users more likely to install this extension and generate tweaks don't want to see recommended articles or video articles or 'you may like...' or whatever, but most of their users do and the change would turn out to be a bad one. Maybe it would reduce accessibility in some way that most users don't care about, etc.
If I had to pick a 'what's the value of all this', I would say that it's less about "what users want from this site" vs. "what users want from sites". For example, if you did the following:
1. Record all the prompts that people create that result in tweaks that people actually use, along with the category of site (banking, blogs, news, shopping, social media, forums); this gives you a general selection of things that people want. Promote these to other users to see how much mass appeal they have
2. Record all the prompts that people create that result in tweaks that people don't actually use; this gives you a selection of things that people think they want but it turns out they don't.
3. Summarize those changes into reports.
Now you could produce a 'web trend report' where you can say:
1. 80% of users are making changes to reduce clutter on sites
2. 40% of users are disabling or hiding auto-play videos
3. 40% of People in countries which use right-to-left languages swap sidebars from one side to another even on left-to-right-language websites
4. The top 'changed' sites in your industry are ... and the changes people make are ...
5. The top changes that people make to sites in your industry are ... and users who make those changes have a 40% lower bounce rate / 30% longer time-on-site / etc. than users who don't make those changes.
On top of that, you could build a model trained on those user prompts that companies could then pay for (somehow?) to run their sites through to provide suggestions of what changes they could make to their sites to satisfy these apparent user needs or preferences without sacrificing their own goals for the websites - e.g. users want to remove auto-playing videos because they're obnoxious, but the company is trying to promote their video content so maybe this model could find a middle-ground to present the video to users in a way that's less obnoxious but generates user engagement.
That's what I think anyway, but I'm not in marketing or whatever.
I know linguistics is descriptive not prescriptive, but it's truly amazing to me the lengths people will go to swear.
Blame Doctorow for swearing, not me!
Like some others here, Firefox is my daily driver and would look forward to anything you could bring our way.
Greasemonkey still works great, no?
My understanding is that it's a bit more of a fragmented ecosystem now but I could be wrong.
Part of the fragmentation (on the extension side at least) came from Manifest V3 which required a massive re-write of logic and introduced a lot of friction for userscript managers. Many projects just died or stayed in maintenance mode since it was a big undertaking. MV3 certainly has been a pain to work with on our side.
Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.
I have a couple of (personal) scripts on Tampermonkey that work ok in Firefox and Chrome, though.
And that isn't even to mention all the guardrails the sites put in place today: content security policies, untrusted html, dynamic refreshing, etc.
So we built this to hopefully make browsing the web more enjoyable for us humans that remain :)
And I'm with you on Firefox. I'd love to be able to go back to Firefox as my daily driver. Will try to prioritize it!
More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916800
This is awesome work - I can already imagine using this to hide features I don't want to see on websites at certain times.
"Facebook does not have a specific policy against Greasemonkey like extensions by name, but it has banned users for creating or using scripts that interfere with Facebook's functionality, which can include those made with Greasemonkey. Such actions are against Facebook's terms of service, which prohibit anything that could disable, overburden, or impair the proper working or appearance of the site.
Interfering with site functionality: Scripts, including Greasemonkey scripts, that alter how Facebook's pages load or work can be seen as a violation of the terms of service, which can lead to account suspension or banning. Examples of banned scripts: A specific example is the ban of the creator of the FB Purity add-on, which was a Greasemonkey script used to customize Facebook, say The Next Web."
Far outweighing the benefit of tweaking the UI.
Wasn't there a recent case where Apple removed some app which manipulated Amazon website behavior?
Since I also have to use Chrome for an extension I'm developing, I pinned Tweeks and will likely reach for it every so often to actually test how well it does, but the demos definitely impressed me.
Out of curiosity, how much, if any, of this did you vibe code?
Thank you! As others pointed out here, we admittedly didn't invest much in the "landing page" aspect, but I did work hard to make a great onboarding experience. Glad it shined through
> Since I also have to use Chrome for an extension I'm developing
We're in the same boat, I wouldn't be using chrome if not for this extension. Great to see HN has a strong cohort of Firefox users!
> Out of curiosity, how much, if any, of this did you vibe code?
A lot of the elements of the extension, backend, and even the onboarding page integrations push at the boundaries of what tools like codex and claude code can do right now.
We do believe in the tech (in some regards, the extension is powered by similar tech), and we are power users of both, but we also know when claude code has said "You're absolutely right" one too many times and we need to dig in and get our hands dirty.
And just to further clarify: "each use" means each generation. Applying the modification after generation doesn't cost tokens
Granted that's not user-friendly, so I don't suggeset it for the typical person. I do think though the typical person would come to love the sort of web that I experience, so it's cool that there's a plugin now. Also the AI scraping (eg on LI) is interesting.
Also I find the founder journey interesting. What made you decide to pivot from AI Recruiting to an extension generator? Saw this https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/MvC-nextbyte-ai-recruit...
I do view this as somewhat of a meta-chrome extension. We've had people who were planning to make a simple, standalone chrome extension just build it using tweeks instead which is super cool to me. And congrats on your launch! Anything you're willing to share here?
> Also I find the founder journey interesting.
HR Tech is a segment littered with past founders and painful stories lol. It's been a long journey, but I will say that building this is more fun so far :)
A bit disappointed that it doesn't work on Firefox. Since Google banned ublock origin I would think much of your core audience is on FF.
> A bit disappointed that it doesn't work on Firefox.
I swear the entire ~3% marketshare of FF users (myself included) are lurking in this thread lol. You are all giving me an excuse to increase the priority of cross-browser support
What makes its results deterministic? Is it a "pick from a menu of curated transformations"?
What is the risk level of it generating something harmful? (Eg. That directly or inadvertently leaks data I don't want to leak)
How human-friendly are the transformations if I want to review them myself before letting what could amount to an AI-powered botnet run in my logged-in useragent?
We've tried. While building this, we tested just about every top model you can think of (closed and open). We weren't able to get any of the open models to perform to our standards. We have a background in model training/fine tuning, so I'm sure some further tuning could even the playing field but definitely getting a bit ahead of myself.
> What makes its results deterministic? Is it a "pick from a menu of curated transformations"?
When you send a request to generate a script (e.g. "change to dark mode"), the agent analyzes your current page (e.g. read through the CSS to look for relevant selectors) and generates targeted edits to achieve the desired results. The response is deterministic JS/CSS that can be applied on each page load (all local after the initial generation).
> What is the risk level of it generating something harmful? (Eg. That directly or inadvertently leaks data I don't want to leak)
We have a permissions framework inspired by Greasemonkey. For example, your script can only make web requests if it includes a grant for GM_xmlhttpRequest. That should clue you in if for some reason a given script is doing something unexpected. You can also dig into the options and find the scripts themselves if you want a thorough review
We're also actively working on an update system that might be helpful here (i.e. if you create a tweek on computer A, install it on computer B, then update it on computer A, you might want it to update on computer B).
We tried to keep the setup process slim: Step 1 is install, step 2 is pin (I guess technically this could be moved later but in testing, without pinning it, users couldn't find it to do the other steps), step 3 is required to make it functional at all (blame chrome manifest V3). Would your preference be to sign up before that?
You can install the script above (copied here: http://tweeks.io/share/script/bcd8bc32b8034b79a78a8564) to remove shorts, no login required :)
> I expected to be able to create a script for myself locally.
When you click to generate a script, a (non-local) LLM assists with the generation. We have tried hard to make something work locally, but it isn't viable with current tech. I apologize if that wasn't clear from the post.
> Why would that lead to spamming requests?
The unfortunate truth of public launches like this is that there are always some bad actors/abusers. I've launched without auth in the past and been burned. Even today, I can see people spamming email sign ups, poking around different endpoints, etc.
Totally understand the friction that auth introduces, and I'm sorry for your experience.
I think I am not fully understanding the use case yet.
> I think I am not fully understanding the use case yet.
Even after playing with it a long time myself, I am still surprised by the creative use cases people come up with! The biggest pause for many users we've seen so far is "This is awesome, but I don't know what to use it for"
The main post text above has some varied examples. The space of possibilities is somewhere between anything a Tampermonkey script can do and anything a standalone chrome extension can do. We plan to keep developing and sharing useful example scripts and we hope as we get more users, they can share their scripts as well to create a community dynamic that makes it easier to get started.
I created a rule to remove thumbnails and shorts from YouTube, and after a few failed attempts, it succeeded! But there were massive tracts of empty space where the images were before. With polish and an accessible way to find and apply vetted addons so that you don't have to (fail at) making your own, I would consider using it.
My daily driver is Firefox, where I've set up custom uBlock Origin cosmetic rules to personalize YouTube by removing thumbnails, short, comments, images, grayscaling everything except the video, etc. My setup works great for me, but I can't easily share it with other people who would find it useful.
I'd love to hear more about the rough edges. We're working hard to polish everything up! Would you be willing to share the script you generated so that I can take a closer look? And any other suggestions are welcome :)
> an accessible way to find and apply vetted addons so that you don't have to (fail at) making your own
This is on the immediate roadmap. We just shipped V0 of the share/profile and sharing + discoverability are going to play an important role in upcoming launches.
Let's say it perfectly one-shotted your request for youtube: Would you be more likely to generate more scripts yourself or still lean toward vetted and relevant existing tweeks?
I am imagining something slightly different perhaps? In the same way Pi Hole has a kind of global list of (ad) URLs to block, I am looking for an extension where all these edits to deshittify a site are applied for me automatically when I visit a site.
That is, if someone has already stripped out banners, etc. (deshittified a site) and (somehow?) "submitted" the edits, I just want to pull those in when I visit the same site.
I understand 1) one person's deshittifying might go too far 2) there will be multiple ways to deshittify a site depending on who does it, and 3) sites change and a deshittify strategy that worked earlier could break.
I have no good answers for the above issues.
The hardest part is doing it in a way that is privacy-first and not annoying. Done wrong, it's kind of like injecting unwanted popups, and no one wants that. Not to mention properly handling points 1-4.
We very likely won't get it perfect on the first try, but hopefully with a few iterations of user feedback we can tune into a useful system.
If anyone is up for writing a front-end framework where you create building blocks for LLMs and then you can use LLMs to reshuffle your website, send me an email!
I want to know what plugins or scripts other Hacker News users use to block annoying segments. Beside uBlock Origin, I use kill-sticky[1] to hide sticky items like dialogs or headers (though sometimes it's wrong), SponsorBlock to skip sponsor segments, DeArrow to change YouTube thumbnails and titles to be less clickbaity. And I use Firefox's Reader View sometime too.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
Edit: And I just found this new Kagi's AI-slop detection on the Hacker News. I'll definitely try!
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