A whole tool, between 10pm and 1am

I had two dozen research tabs open and no decent way to park them. Old me would have filed that annoyance under “someday” and kept suffering it. Instead I opened an editor around ten at night and described the browser extension I wanted. Group my tabs by task, and keep a rolling clipboard history so I stop losing snippets to the void.

By about one in the morning it worked. Nothing fancy, a couple hundred lines that do exactly those two things, but it worked, and I used it the next morning while writing. In fact I’m using the clipboard half of it right now to juggle quotes for this note.

Here’s what actually got to me about it. The extension isn’t clever, and it never needed to be. I built it because the cost of building it had dropped to roughly the cost of complaining about it out loud one more time. A few years ago that same itch would have stayed an itch, because three hours of my evening was too much to spend on a glorified tab tidier.

That’s the shift nobody screenshots. The viral demos are always the ten-times-faster refactors and the agent swarms. The quiet win is that the boring little tools finally get made, the ones that only ever mattered to one person. Usually that person is me, at 1am, slightly too pleased with myself.