Here's the pattern that kills deep reading: you're three paragraphs into a dense article, hit a term you half-know — synecdoche, say, or the Hanseatic League — and face a bad choice. Open a tab, lose your place, spend four minutes on Wikipedia, forget what you were reading. Or skip it and stay shallow.
rabbitholes is a Chrome extension I built to break that choice. Highlight any text and a shadow-DOM tooltip renders next to your cursor with an explanation from Claude Haiku. Shadow DOM so it doesn't interfere with the host page's styles or layout — the original article stays exactly as it was.
The part that matters for tangent-following: every word in the explanation is itself clickable. Drag across a phrase to select it. You can go three or four hops deep — the extension tracks a rabbit-hole counter — without ever opening a new tab or losing your place in the original article. Every response ends with two suggested threads worth following, and a pencil icon opens a free-form follow-up that inherits the current context.
When you want more than an LLM summary, the globe icon re-runs the query with Brave Search results, source chips included.
Zero telemetry, no intermediary server. Your API key sits in chrome.storage.sync and requests go directly from your browser to api.anthropic.com and api.search.brave.com.
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