I built a Chrome extension to stop losing my AI conversations

Xnomad-dev — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:45:35 +0000

I use Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini every day for research, writing, debugging, and planning. Some of those conversations are genuinely valuable — a well-reasoned breakdown I spent 20 minutes refining, a code review I want to reference later, a research thread I'll need again next week.

And then I close the tab.

The problem isn't that the conversation disappears. It's that there's no good way to keep it. Copy-paste strips formatting. Screenshots aren't searchable. Manually saving to Notion means re-doing all the structure yourself.

I wanted to press one button and have a proper document.

So I built ChatSnap.

What it does
ChatSnap is a Chrome extension that exports your AI conversations in one click — from Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini — into four formats:

Markdown — with YAML frontmatter, clean headers, code blocks preserved
JSON — structured schema, every message with role + content + timestamps where available
DOC — Word-compatible, opens in Google Docs or Microsoft Word
PDF — locally generated, no print dialog, no server
You open a conversation, click the extension, pick your format, click Export. That's it.

What I was trying to avoid
Every "AI chat exporter" I found before building this had at least one of these problems:

Required an API key (why do I need an API key to save my own conversation?)
Sent your chat to an external server (hard no)
Only worked on one platform
Exported plain text with no structure
ChatSnap does everything locally in your browser. No API key. No login. No server. Nothing leaves your machine.

The part that was surprisingly hard
PDF generation sounds simple until you realise jsPDF can't render Arabic, Bangla, CJK characters, or emoji correctly. I ended up building two render paths — a vector path for Latin/English (selectable text, small file size) and a raster path for complex scripts (browser renders it offscreen, html2canvas captures it, jsPDF slices it into A4 pages).

Detection is ratio-based: if 10% or more of the characters are complex-script, it switches to raster. Otherwise you get crisp, copy-able text. A few stray glyphs don't force the whole document into image mode.

Who it's for
If you treat AI conversations as working documents — research threads, code sessions, content drafts — ChatSnap gives you a way to actually keep them in a format that's useful outside the platform.

It's free, open, and everything runs on your machine.

Install ChatSnap on the Chrome Web Store

DEV Community: Xnomad-dev

I built a Chrome extension to stop losing my AI conversations