A Browser That Knows What You Know

A Chrome extension that watches what you browse and builds a knowledge base from it. When you ask it something, it answers using what you have already read, not what the internet says in general.

The idea is not complicated. The use case is less obvious.

The problem it might solve

There is a specific kind of frustration that happens in knowledge work: you read something useful three weeks ago, you half-remember it, and you cannot find it again. You cannot Google a half-memory. The article title is gone. The site is gone. What remains is a vague shape of an idea that you are not sure you are remembering correctly.

A browser that watched you read that article could surface it. Not by filename, not by URL, but by meaning. "What did I read about rate limiting strategies?" and it knows, because it was there.

The more interesting use case

You spend four days reading about a topic: distributed tracing, or a new language, or a medical thing you are worried about. Forty tabs, a dozen articles, three documentation pages. By the end you have a position, but you could not tell someone exactly how you got there.

The extension synthesizes it back to you. Not the internet's view. Your research. The sources you chose to read, weighted by how long you spent on them. That is a fundamentally different kind of answer than any AI gives right now, because it is built from your judgment about what was worth reading, not a training set.

What it is really about

The gap between what we consume and what we can retrieve is large and mostly wasted. We read more than we remember. The extension is not an AI assistant. It is closer to a second brain that was actually paying attention when you were not.

What I am not sure about

Whether people want this, or whether they want to feel like they remember things themselves. There is something uncomfortable about outsourcing recall. Also: privacy. A thing that knows everything you have browsed is a thing with a lot of power over you.

The killer use case might not be retrieval at all. It might be the moment when you are about to read something and the extension tells you that you already have, six months ago, and here is what you thought of it then.

Still thinking.