While developers and software engineers are certainly going to hate me for saying this (and I completely understand, I'm studying to be one too), I think vibe coding is one of the most fun ways to build small projects. It's completely taken away the barrier that once stopped non-technical people from actually bringing the thousands of ideas they have to life within hours.

To do that previously, you'd have needed to either pay someone good money to build it for you or spend months learning how to code yourself. Now, is it a replacement for proper software engineering? Not even close. However, you should absolutely be taking advantage of it for personal tools and small projects. Chrome extensions are genuinely the best place to start.

Chrome extensions are the easiest way to start vibe coding

Seriously, you can build one during your lunch break

If you've been following the vibe coding hype, you've likely seen people building apps and websites. In fact, a lot of the popular vibe-coding tools like Replit and Lovable are built specifically for that. That said, one type of project that doesn't get nearly as much attention, and is arguably even better suited to vibe coding are Chrome extensions. When you're building an app or a website and want to push further, you have to figure out hosting, databases, authentication, and security. These are all things vibe coding still struggles with.

When vibe-coding Chrome extensions, most of these issues pretty much go away. Chrome extensions are small and self-contained. They run locally in your browser, and you don't need to worry about deploying everything. Their scope is naturally limited to solving one specific problem, meaning they're extremely easy to build with AI. Extensions are also typically built using relatively simple web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — all languages AI tools tend to handle pretty well.

When you're using a browser and notice it can't do a specific thing, the solution is typically heading to the Chrome Web Store and hoping someone's already built what you need. With vibe coding, you can just build it yourself. The difference, though, is that what you'll build will be customized to your exact workflow, with only the features you actually need.

Vibe-coding a Chrome extension is extremely easy

All you need is an idea

Before you jump into vibe-coding a Chrome extension, you need to decide what tool you want to use for the process. Currently, you have a never-ending list of options. You can use Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Antigravity, or even just a chatbot like Claude or ChatGPT. I even vibe-coded a Chrome extension using Perplexity's cloud-based OpenClaw alternative a few days ago! The more important bit, though, is deciding what you want to build.

The easiest way to do this is to just think of something that always frustrates you when browsing the web, or just... in general! Maybe it's a website that doesn't have a dark mode, a website that's missing a feature you've been waiting months for, a task you find yourself repeating every single day, something you find yourself resorting to a third-party tool for — anything! Just grab one idea and begin building it.

For instance, the first Chrome extension I vibe-coded was extremely random. While using Instagram on my phone and trying to see if a specific person had viewed my story, I thought, "why has Instagram not added a search feature for story viewers yet?"

Building an iPhone or Android app for this didn't make much sense, since I didn't want to have to open a dedicated app every time I wanted to search through my story viewers. Given Instagram's website now lets you view stories and the viewers too, I knew this was a problem I could solve by building a simple Chrome extension.

Back then, I hadn't tried Claude Code yet, so I simply opened a new Claude thread and described what I wanted. Within minutes, it built a first prototype. Instead of giving me the files and asking me to copy-paste them into an IDE and whatnot, it gave me a downloadable ZIP file. All I needed to do on my end was download it, unzip it, and load it into Chrome as an unpacked extension.

While I now use more in-depth prompts when vibe-coding something since it reaps more accurate results, this was one of the first projects I had vibe-coded, and this was exactly what I prompted Claude:

The first prototype Claude generated didn't work, and it recognized that the DOM scraping approach it was using was the culprit. It then re-built the extension using Instagram's internal API endpoints. The second version it created worked as intended, but it didn't let me search through individual stories.

As expected, the third version it created did what I wanted perfectly. It added a Story strip at the top of the extension window, which displayed thumbnails of all active stories with timestamps and view counts. Once I tapped a story, it'd display just the story's viewers.

I've been turning every frustration into an extension

My browser has more extensions than I'd like to admit

I've created countless Chrome extensions since that Instagram story extension. For instance, I get new article ideas at the most random times. So, I vibe-coded an extension that lets me dump an idea and add a working title. I can tag it with a type, assign a publication, and also set it as a priority.

Given I get most ideas when I'm browsing, the extension also auto-captures whatever URL I'm on as the source. This way, when I come back to the idea later, I know exactly what inspired it. I also created an extension to help with my news-spotting workflow! My college also recently switched to online classes, and I noticed that I'd constantly find myself screenshotting what the professor was showing on the screen.

The problem was that I would end up losing track of these screenshots—they'd get buried in my camera roll or downloads folder with generic file names, and by the time I needed them for an exam, I couldn't find anything. So, I built an extension that lets me screenshot what's on my screen, tag it with the course name, and automatically organize everything into folders.

I also created an extension that tracks how many words I write every week, and another to help me analyze headlines against my own patterns.

Most fun I've had with AI

Like I mentioned in the beginning, the ideas for extensions you can vibe-code are endless. Just pick a frustration and turn it into a tiny tool that solves it.