Reinventing the wheel, just because existing solution was not 100% fit, is quite familiar to engineers. One of the cool things about being a developer is that you don't just build for users, you can also build for yourself. But, of course, time is money (for the ones who have a job). Sometimes, we decide it is not worth to build a tool for ourself, because it might take a long time to build it.

At least, it used to take a lot of our time. Now with AI, You can vibe-code tools (like extensions, bots). For personal tools, perfect code doesn't really matter. And also, you don't always need a polished UI. Sometimes you don't need an UI at all.

Extensions I made

1. FeedBlocker

My first extension Feedblocker is just like that. I don't UI to manage the extension at all. It is just an extension that blocks social media at certain time in some way. Extension:

• only allows using Twitter and Linkedin at 19-21PM.
• It blocks Feed of Youtube and only allows to watch a video. No feed.
• It hides all telegram channels' posts during the weekdays. Only DMs

I do not have to make it a dynamic app for everyone else. All the numbers are hardcoded to an app and designed for my case. Just like that, I made the internet less distracting for me.

2. Bluequote

This one came out for a different reason. I once tried to run my blog on Substack. It was really good platform for writing articles. But they banned me for some reason.

So, I decided to run my blog on roshi.ink. But Substack had really good feature that I missed: Sharing part of the article as an Image quote. I almost fully vibe-coded the extension that makes selected text on the page sharable as an image. And I saw it can be useful for other people also. So, I tweaked the design a little bit and I uploaded to Chrome Web Store. Now you can download and use if you want.

Go build your tool.