Every article I read has words I half-know. Terms I skipped past in undergrad, concepts that would open up the whole paragraph if I just knew what they meant. Opening a new tab to look them up works once. By the third detour I've lost the thread of what I was reading entirely.
So I built rabbitholes — a Chrome extension that turns any highlighted text into an inline explanation next to your cursor, without leaving the page.
The tooltip renders in a shadow DOM, so it doesn't touch the host page's styles or layout. Explanations come from Claude Haiku 4.5 directly — requests go from your browser straight to api.anthropic.com, no intermediary server, zero telemetry.
The part I use most: every explanation ends with two suggested rabbit-hole topics. Click one and you're one hop deeper. The extension tracks how many hops you've taken — hit 'philosophy' and you get a shareable trail of where you went.
There are a few other entry points worth knowing:
- Click any word in the explanation to explore it further, or drag across words to pick a phrase
- Pencil icon opens a free-form follow-up that inherits the current context as background
- Globe icon re-runs the query enriched with Brave Search results, with source chips you can click through
The API key lives in chrome.storage.sync (encrypted, never leaves the browser). Manifest V3.
// Nothing installs on the server side.
// You supply your own Anthropic API key.
// Requests: browser → api.anthropic.com
// That's the whole data path.
The thing that surprised me building this: the rabbit-hole counter makes you want to go deeper rather than feel guilty about it. It reframes the tangent as the point.
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