Theo fixes a GitHub annoyance with a 90 second Chrome extension

Theo asked Opus 5.5 to fix one of his biggest annoyances on GitHub, that clicking a screenshot opens it in a new tab. He says that 1.5 minutes later he had a working Chrome extension that changes the behavior.

Theo - t3.gg

@theo

X

I know this is basic stuff, but it still feels magical that you can just fix things.

He is upfront that this is not an impressive piece of engineering. The interesting part is the economics. A Chrome extension that overrides one click handler on one site is an afternoon of yak shaving for most people, which is why nobody does it. You open the new tab, you close the new tab, you do it again tomorrow, and the irritation never crosses the threshold where fixing it is worth the context switch. When the build cost drops to the length of a coffee refill, that threshold moves, and a whole category of small complaints about software you do not control becomes addressable.

The receipt

"I know this is basic stuff, but it still feels magical that you can just fix things," Theo wrote. Worth reading as the counterweight to the usual benchmark arguments. Most of what the agents actually get used for is not a four month Rust port, it is the thing you were going to tolerate forever.

For working engineers, the honest frame here is scope. This is one person, one prompt, one trivial extension, and no claim about correctness beyond the fact that it works for him. A browser extension that touches one DOM behavior on one page is close to the ideal case for a coding model. The surface is tiny, the feedback loop is immediate, and if it breaks you notice in one click. That is a different proposition from pointing the same model at a codebase where failure is quiet.

Theo has been running Opus 5.5 hard since it landed, including the port where it finished a four month TypeScript to Rust migration in 10 hours. The small stuff is the part that generalizes to everyone else.