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J Now
J Now

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Reading trails: a rabbit-hole counter for inline research

There's a Wikipedia game where you click the first link of any article, keep clicking, and eventually land on Philosophy — usually in under 20 hops. The same thing happens in real reading. You half-know a word, you look it up, that explanation uses a term you half-know, and suddenly you're three concepts from where you started.

I wanted that experience to work on every page I read, without the tab-switching.

rabbitholes is a Chrome extension. Highlight any text, and a shadow-DOM tooltip renders an explanation from Claude Haiku 4.5 next to your cursor — doesn't touch the host page DOM. Click any word in that explanation to go deeper. Drag across a phrase to pick a chunk.

The part I keep using: every explanation ends with two suggested rabbit-hole topics. One click opens the next layer. The extension tracks how many hops deep you've gone with a counter. If you start from 'philosophy' or navigate there through clicks, you get a shareable trail showing each hop.

A few other things in the extension worth knowing:

// Requests go directly browser → api.anthropic.com
// No intermediary server. No analytics. No telemetry.
// API key stored in chrome.storage.sync — encrypted, never leaves the browser.
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There's also a globe icon that re-answers any query enriched with Brave Search results, with source chips you can click through. And a pencil icon that opens a free-form follow-up input, with the current context carried as background.

Manifest V3. You bring your own Anthropic key.

https://github.com/robertnowell/rabbitholes

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