Reading about Byzantine fault tolerance and I half-knew what Byzantine meant — something about indirect failure, right? Close enough to keep reading, not close enough to actually understand the argument. I'd been doing that for years: skimming past the words that would have made the paragraph land.
rabbitholes is a Chrome extension I built to stop doing that. Highlight any text and a shadow-DOM tooltip renders an explanation from Claude Haiku 4.5 inline next to your cursor — the host page is untouched, no layout shift, no new tab. Every explanation ends with two suggested follow-on topics. Click any word in the response to dig into it, or drag across a phrase to explore that instead.
The depth counter is the part I use most: it tracks how many hops you've gone from the original highlight. Start on a Hacker News thread about distributed systems, end up five hops deep at the Byzantine Generals Problem, and you get a shareable trail of the path.
For times when the model explanation isn't enough, there's a globe icon that re-runs the query enriched with Brave Search results and surfaces source chips inline.
No analytics, no telemetry, no intermediary server. Requests go directly from the browser to api.anthropic.com and api.search.brave.com. Manifest V3. Your Anthropic API key lives in chrome.storage.sync and never leaves the browser.
The extension is open source.
github.com/robertnowell/rabbitholes
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