Letting Claude Loose in Chrome

Three tasks I walked away from, and what Claude in Chrome did while I was gone.

For a while I was cruising along with Claude, and things were cool. Occasionally, I’d get some guidance from Claude, jump over to Chrome to take care of something, and just jump and back and forth whenever I hit a wall. Claude was an awesome helper in those moments, but it was a lot of back and forth. It worked, but a lot of the time I was just sort of playing middle-man. Is that just me?

A few weeks ago I started using Claude in Chrome. It's a browser extension that lets Claude see and use the tabs I have open. Once it's on, it can read the page I'm on, scroll around, click buttons, fill out forms, etc. At first, it’s wild to watch. Caveat: it’s super slow, but I’ve been enjoying figuring out what it can do, especially when I walk away.

So, I want to share three things I've used it for in the last month, because each one surprised me, and none of them needed me to be a specialist in what I was doing.

Setting up saalo.co

A recently decided to buy the saalo.co domain on GoDaddy, and needed to do a few things with it. Make the website live at the new domain, and get email working so messages sent to hello@saalo.co or support@saalo.co would actually reach me (and be able to send from them, and make sure the web app, OAuth flows, etc. all pointed to the right places. Each of those involves a different service: GoDaddy for the domain registration, Firebase for the website, Cloudflare for DNS and email routing. None of them talk to each other unless you go to each one's dashboard and tell it about the others. And if you’re like me, you have NO CLUE what any of them mean…

I started out going back and forth with claude getting instructions and doing Q&A. Eventually, the lightbulb went off, and I told Claude to just go into Chrome and do it all for me… Claude had me log into each site, like GoDaddy. It moved the nameservers from GoDaddy over to Cloudflare, set up the records on Cloudflare that pointed the domain at Firebase, went over to Firebase to authorize the new domain there, then back to Cloudflare to set up email forwarding for three inbound addresses. Again, I still have no clue what any of that means… But it was done, the site came up at saalo.co and the email started arriving.

ElevenLabs

I've been playing with ElevenLabs to build a small voice project. Its builder uses concepts I didn't recognize: tools, system prompts, knowledge bases, evaluation criteria. So, I opened Claude in Chrome on the ElevenLabs documentation and asked it to read through the Elevenlabs docs with me, and then go configure the thing.

It read the docs, set everything up, and even wrote automated testing. The whole loop felt like asking a coworker who already knows the platform to set it up for me. It’s incredible to watch. Sidenote: it was funny to watch Claude pick “the best” model from a drop down, and … surpise, it picked an Anthropic model.

Genealogy, this one surprised me!

I’ve always been into ancestry, and a few months ago, I enlisted Claude’s help. I wanted to apply for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, which requires you to prove a direct line of descent from a Revolutionary War patriot. I gave it what I already knew about my family tree and told it I wanted it to triangulate each generation to prove that each generation’s parents were clearly documented in original documents.

Then I wen to the kitchen to make dinner.

When I came back, Claude had seventeen tabs open! FamilySearch archives, state historical society pages, regimental rosters, scanned baptism records from churches in 17th century New Amsterdam! It had proven all the links and found my revolutionary war ancestor. Fun fact: most of these docs are all sitting on the public internet on sites I’d never heard of - FamilySearch, 3Fold, etc. And, thanks to Claude, I now have my SAR membership.

Where it falls down

None of these runs were clean all the way through. Claude in Chrome mis-clicks. It gets stuck in loops. It’s slow. Every now and then it heads in a direction you didn't ask for and you have to back it up. As usual, Trust but verify.

If you want to try this yourself

Claude in Chrome is a browser extension you install on top of regular Claude. Once it's on, you point it at a tab and tell it what you want done. The thing that took me a while to internalize is that you don't need to know how to do the task. You only need to know what you want the outcome to be.

A few things that helped me. Be specific about the goal and what counts as success. If the task touches an account or record you care about, you’ll have to log in first, then watch the first few clicks before you walk away. Give it space to ask you questions before it starts. And read the recap at the end.

The other thing worth knowing is that it's slow. It reads the page, decides what to click, waits for things to load, then does it again on the next page. So, the best things to give it are tasks you can walk away from. The genealogy run was the cleanest version of this: I gave it the task, went to dinner, and came back two hours later to work that would have taken me a week of evenings to do by hand.

Here's a prompt you can paste into Claude in Chrome on whatever site you've been meaning to figure out but kept not figuring out.

I want you to help me get something done on the website I have open in this tab. I'm not an expert in this area, so don't wait for me to tell you which buttons to click. You drive.

Before you start, ask me a couple of questions in plain English so you understand what I actually want. Things like what I'm ultimately trying to accomplish, and what success would look like to me. Once I've answered, read the current page and just go. Open whatever other tabs you need. Use whatever resources you find.

A few things to keep in mind as you work.

Don't change account, billing, or security settings without checking with me first. If something on the page looks wrong, or you're unsure whether to proceed, stop and ask. And if you find yourself doing the same thing over and over without making progress, stop and tell me, instead of trying it again.

One more thing. These browser sessions are slow, so I might not be sitting here watching the whole time. If I've stepped away, that's by design. Get as far as you can on your own. When I come back I want to see what you found and where things stand, not a long list of questions you held off on.

Since I started using Claude in Chrome I find myself wishing more of the things I work in had a web interface. Native apps have been amazing for years, but now with Substack, ElevenLabs, ancestry sites, the Google Search Console dashboard, even creating drafts in Gmail. Vendor dashboards, admin portals, app consoles, maybe the procurement tool nobody in your company understands. Just keep a human in the loop for one way doors. Anywhere there's a webpage Claude can read and click around in, it can do most of the work. Where it can't help is the stuff that doesn't live in a browser. Xcode, terminal, etc. That still needs me at the keyboard (for now…).

If you try Claude in Chrome on something you've been putting off, I'd love to hear what worked and what didn't. And if these posts are useful to you, subscribing would mean a lot.