Can I vibecode Resurf?

KINDA · weekend project

price variesbuild time a weekendcategory 📌 bookmarksreplaced by 0 people

The core mechanic is unglamorous and very buildable: capture the text of pages you spend real time on, embed it, store it locally, then search and resurface it. An agent can get a Chrome extension doing that in a weekend, and because the corpus is your own browsing, there is no data moat to lose. Where the DIY version cracks is everything around the loop: cross-device sync, mobile and Safari, capture quality on SPAs and paywalled or auth-gated pages, and the taste of deciding what deserves to come back. Also the honest failure mode of every personal recall tool, which is that you stop opening it after week three. Buildable, yes; pleasant enough that you keep it, less certain.

the prompt

Build a local-only Chrome extension called "Recall" that indexes pages I actually read and lets me search and resurface them. Empty folder, start from scratch.

Stack, no substitutions: TypeScript, Vite with @crxjs/vite-plugin, Chrome Manifest V3, Dexie for IndexedDB, Preact for UI, @xenova/transformers running all-MiniLM-L6-v2 fully in the extension for embeddings.

In scope:
- Content script that waits until a tab has been visible and scrolled for at least 20 seconds, then extracts readable text using Mozilla Readability. Skip if under 300 words.
- Store per page: url, canonical url, title, site, extracted text, word count, first seen, last seen, visit count, dwell seconds total. Dedupe on canonical url and update rather than insert.
- Chunk text into roughly 500 token pieces, embed each chunk in a background service worker queue, store vectors as Float32Array in Dexie. Never block browsing.
- New tab page replacement with: a search box doing cosine similarity over chunks, results grouped by page showing title, site, the best matching snippet, and dates.
- A "Resurface" panel on the same page: 5 items per day chosen by a simple score mixing age, dwell time, and revisit count, with buttons for open, snooze 30 days, and never again.
- Options page with a blocklist of domains and url patterns, defaulting to blocking localhost, mail, banking, and any url containing "logout" or "checkout".
- Export everything to a single JSON file and import it back.

Out of scope, do not build: accounts, any server, cloud sync, telemetry, analytics, payment, sharing, mobile.

Optional: if OPENAI_API_KEY exists in .env, offer it in options as an alternative embedding backend. Default stays on-device. Never commit .env.

Deliver a README with load-unpacked instructions, a note on where the data lives, and one command to wipe the whole index.

$ open in your agent (prompt prefilled, you press enter) or copy it raw · this prompt is generated from the build plan · improve it via PR

why people still pay

Because the value only shows up after months of quiet, correct capture, and a homegrown extension that silently stops recording on a Chrome update fails invisibly. Paying for it means the capture layer is somebody's job, the mobile gap is at least on a roadmap, and the ranking has been tuned against more browsing than yours. Personal recall tools are also the classic case where the build is fun and the upkeep is not.

what you lose

xSync across devices and browsers, so your phone reading never enters the index

xCapture on anything that is not desktop Chrome: Safari, mobile apps, in-app browsers

xRobust extraction on SPAs, infinite scrolls, PDFs, and anything behind a login wall

xCuration judgment: your version will resurface plenty of pricing pages and airline confirmations

xSomeone else maintaining it against Chrome manifest changes that break extensions on a schedule

prior art · use these instead of building, if you'd rather

Nothing worth pointing at. That's why the prompt exists.

share on X ↗"I just replaced Resurf with one prompt"