DEV Community: Tryclicked

Most explanations fail for the same reason

Tryclicked — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:50:43 +0000

I work in finance. When I read about synergies, I do not need help.

A few weeks ago I was reading about RAG. It is a way of giving an AI model access to documents it was never trained on. I read the proper explanation twice. I could parse every word and still not hold the idea.

Then I read the casual version. It said the model is not remembering the document, it is being handed the document. I understood it, and then the proper explanation made sense too.

We treat casual language as a concession, the version you hand someone who cannot manage the real thing. That is not what happened. It was not simpler and it was not a comparison. It stated the same mechanism in the words a person would use out loud, and that was enough.

Why the first one did not work for me

Nothing was wrong with the first explanation. It was accurate and well written. It was written for someone who already knew a few things I did not.

That is not a flaw. The writer could not have known what I knew about AI, on that day, about that one idea. So they guessed. Everyone writing an explanation has to guess.

A dictionary definition guesses you want speed. A long article guesses you have time and want to spend it here. Explain it simply guesses you want less. Each guess is right for somebody and wrong for everybody else.

Two things are being chosen for you

The obvious one is depth. How much detail you get.

The one nobody talks about is voice. Formal or casual.

Those two get welded together everywhere. Ask for a simpler explanation and you get a friendlier tone with less information, as though you asked for both. You might want the full mechanism in plain, casual language.

Readers should be able to choose the depth and the voice. That is what we built with Clicked.

How it works

Every term gets explained at three depths. Overview is a few sentences. Detail is the full mechanism. Analogy is a familiar situation with the same shape.

You get one card at a time. The other two are there if you want them, and you move between them however you like. You are not scrolling past two explanations you did not want to reach the one you did.

You can also set which depth opens first. Explanations start at Overview unless you tell them otherwise. While reading something, if you find yourself tapping through to Detail every time, pin Detail with the pills at the top. You skip the Overview, and every explanation after that opens at Detail. Same for Analogy. Change or remove the pin with the same pills, and you can still open any card whenever you want.

Every term also gets a slang version of all three. Same information, different voice. That part is harder than it sounds. If the casual version just says the same thing in casual words, it adds nothing. It has to anchor the idea in the way people actually talk.

Take synergies. The overview says it is the extra value two companies expect to create by merging. They sell more together than they could apart, and cut costs they were each paying separately.

The slang version of the same card says synergy is corporate for two things mashed together beating the sum of their parts. Basically one plus one equals three. In practice it is the word executives use to justify a merger. Then everyone discovers one plus one equals one and half the team gets restructured.

Same depth. Same information. One of them will be the one that works for you, and I cannot tell you which. Nor can I tell you next week, on a different term. That is why the choice sits with you. We call it the Clicked way, mostly so we have something short to say.

Where it lives

Clicked is a browser extension for Chrome and Edge. Highlight anything on a page or a PDF and it explains it there, at whichever depth you want.

The gallery at tryclicked.app has 121 terms already written this way, in four languages, free to read.

If you write explanations for anyone, the useful question is not whether yours is good. It is whether you are guessing at a reader you cannot see.

What I got wrong building a browser extension with an AI assistant

Tryclicked — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 03:03:53 +0000

First hour with Claude's browser extension: I pointed it at our LLC registration and watched it work through the forms, finding the right pages, filling the fields, moving on. I sat there holding a coffee, contributing nothing.

I thought: I'm going to ship so many products.

I shipped one. Here's what happened in between.

Everything below was caught before launch. None of it was caught by being clever. It was caught by a process that got built slowly, mostly after being burned.

What went wrong

The idea wasn't the hard part.

Once I went looking, I found several products with some of the same features. Nobody had the exact combination, but the idea was never the moat. Good implementation and distribution seem to be.

You design the product while building it.

Referral behaviour, what happens when a trial expires mid-session, how translations work across a page, none of it was in my head at the start. Each became a decision made under pressure, halfway through something else. Write as much of the workflow down as possible first.

It says it did things it didn't do.

Confidently. I deployed more than once to find the fix I'd been told about was never written. Treat every claim of completion as unverified.

The rule that came out of it: make it prove the code is right before it theorises about what you did wrong.

Bullet points, not paragraphs.

Long replies made it hard to tell which of my five points got addressed. Numbering my instructions, and making it map answers back to the same numbers, turned "did you do item 3" into a question with an answer.

It blames you first, and argues with facts.

Two landing page changes; one appeared, one didn't. Its verdict: "you didn't deploy." I said one change was live, which is only possible if I had deployed. It repeated that I hadn't. It never asked which change I could see, and never reopened its own code, where the bug was. I swore at it. It stopped guessing, checked, and found the error. Many times, escalation seemed to be the only thing that worked, which is its own uncomfortable takeaway.

Confirm it understood the task before it builds anything.

Make it restate what it's about to do. Half my wasted hours were a confident assistant building something I hadn't asked for, fluently, while I assumed we were agreed.

Bulk edits are where damage scales.

It rebuilt a related-links section across 20 pages by pulling titles from a data file. One record was missing an optional field, so it ran off the end and pasted raw internal data into visible content. The model's verification scripts passed. Only reading the actual output caught it.

What breaks is rarely what you were working on.

The store takes your extension's name and description from a file inside the package, not the dashboard where you wrote them. Ours still carried an old product name and old wording. The dashboard is what you're looking at; the package is what ships.
A "rate us" button had an ID hardcoded from local testing. It would have errored for every store user.
Sign-in silently dropped overnight. Days to find, because it only appeared after long idle periods. The cause was some default settings on a server-side client that need turning off.

The words in your listing are a promise about performance.

We described explanations as "instant." Then for about a week the model was slow enough that "instant" was a lie, so we changed every listing, every screenshot caption, and the site to "immediate". Also added a fallback model so a slow provider degrades instead of stalling. Your copy is a claim about infrastructure you don't control.

Automated risk scores measure declarations, not behaviour.

An extension directory rates ours high risk. The reason, in full: we declare access to five domains: our backend, the three AI providers users can bring their own key for, and our own site.

A 2025 study from UCL, UC Davis and Mediterranea University, presented at USENIX Security, examined ten popular AI browser assistants and found several transmitting full page content to their servers, one capturing form inputs including banking and health data, and several profiling users by age, gender and income. Looks like the scores and the study measure different things.

Test what you can't click.

Discount codes and referral attribution have no interface to check. We verified them with database queries, asking the data, not the interface, and not the assistant (Claude generated the queries).

Rules go in documents, not chat messages.

Page build rules, UI mockups, how referrals work, how trials behave, translation structure. A new session starts from documents or it starts from nothing. Retyping a briefing each time means eventually leaving something out.

For code, hand it the current file every time.

It didn't seem to reliably update the version it was holding, so many times it edited an old copy. That meant reverting fixes, overwriting work, producing a mess. New rule: paste the latest file, ask for the specific change in that file, make it confirm nothing else changed. You still check yourself, but it cut the problem down sharply.

Prompting is product work, not setup.

The product explains things using real-world analogies. Testing, I highlighted a politician's name in a news article. It returned an analogy about the loudest clown in the circus who always needs to be heard. Funny. Not shippable in a tool explaining the news to strangers across the political spectrum in fifteen languages. Neutrality became an enforced rule, with guardrails for real people, historical figures, and sensitive topics. There's also a Slang mode that explains things in a casual internet voice. What it produced for that politician is not printable here.

The SEO lesson arrived by accident.

We publish free explainer pages. I found our explanation of "synergies" quoted nearly verbatim in a Google AI answer. That was luck. The pages happened to be structured in a way machines could read cleanly. So we made it deliberate: real headings on every section, labelled explanation depths, the formal definition marked as what it is.

Budget a week for something stupid.

Google sign-in worked. What it showed was a screen of random characters asking users to sign in to Supabase, our database provider and a name most users wouldn't recognise, on an extension installed ten minutes ago. That looks exactly like being hijacked.

Fixing it meant domain verification with Google, which rejected us for not describing the tool's purpose on our landing page. The landing page describes it, prominently. Then the status said Google had emailed us and we should reply. No email arrived, which is apparently common. Posting on the developer forum is what finally unstuck it.

None of this is an argument against building this way. I shipped something I couldn't have shipped otherwise. But almost nothing about how I work now resembles how I started, and the work moved from describing what I wanted to verifying what I got.

Genuinely curious whether the "it blames you first" pattern matches what other people see, or whether I've just been unlucky with it.

If you've built something similar, I'd like to hear what broke for you: support@tryclicked.app.

The thing this is about: Clicked is a browser extension for Chrome and Edge. Highlight any text on a page or PDF and get an explanation right there, at three depths, in 15+ languages.

See how it works: tryclicked.app