I Asked AI for Chrome Extension Ideas. It Kept Saying “AI Can Already Do That.”

I’ve been building small Chrome extensions lately.

And, like many developers, I often ask AI for ideas.

Something like:

What small browser problems are still worth solving?

The answers are usually reasonable.

But there’s one response I keep running into.

“You can already do that with AI.”

Need to summarize some text?
AI can do it.

Need to clean up copied text?
AI can do it.

Need to compare information from several pages?
AI can do it.

Need to rewrite something before sending it?
AI can do it.

Technically, that’s true.

But after building several small tools, I think it’s also the wrong question.

“Can AI do it?” is a very low bar

Almost anything involving text can now be done with an AI chat.

But that often means:

1. Copy something
2. Open an AI tool
3. Paste it
4. Explain what you want
5. Check the result
6. Copy it again
7. Go back to what you were doing

That works.

But it’s still a workflow.

Sometimes a tiny browser extension can turn that into:

select → click → done

That difference matters more than I expected.

A small example

One of the extensions I built is called Copy & Prep.

It lets me collect text from multiple pages, reorder it, clean it up, and copy everything together.

Could I do that with ChatGPT?

Of course.

But I don’t actually want to explain the same task to ChatGPT every time.

I just want the text.

That made me realize something.

AI capability is not the same as product UX

When I ask AI whether an idea is useful, it tends to think in terms of capability.

“This task can already be performed.”

Users often think differently.

“How many steps does this take?”

Those are not the same question.

And I think this creates a small opportunity for browser extensions.

Not to compete with AI.

But to remove the need to ask AI in the first place.

The question I use now

So when I think about small tool ideas, I’ve stopped asking:

Can AI do this?

Instead, I ask:

Should the user have to ask AI to do this every time?

If the answer is no, there may still be a useful little tool hiding there.

And honestly, I find those small tools much more interesting to build.