I don't need AI to build me a new app. I need it to make Jira bearable

Last week I asked Claude to build me a Jira sidebar that shows cross-project dependency graphs — the kind Jira buries across 4 clicks and 3 page loads. 4 prompts. Works inside my actual Jira. It just used Claude Chrome extension that injects a panel into the page I already have open.

And I keep thinking: why isn't everyone doing this?

The entire AI coding conversation is about building new apps from scratch. Cool. But I don't need a new app. Most people spend their workday inside apps they didn't choose: Jira, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, etc. These tools are not going anywhere. My company chose them in 2019 and they're entrenched until at least 2029.

Chrome extensions just reads what's already in the DOM and augments it.

Is there a fundamental reason this can't work at scale that I'm not seeing? Why isn't Claude's Chrome extension catching more attention?

16 points | by niel_hu 16 hours ago

4 comments

  • CodeBit26 7 hours ago
    This resonates so much. We’ve spent years automating the 'coding' part, but the 'process' part is still stuck in a click-heavy 2010s workflow. I don't want an AI that writes boilerplate; I want an AI that observes my Git commits and Slack discussions, then automatically updates the ticket status, linked PRs, and documentation. The real productivity killer in 2026 isn't the lack of code assistants, it's the 'administrative tax' of keeping project management tools in sync with reality
  • PaulHoule 16 hours ago
    It's definitely part of the SaaS-apocalypse story. LLMs shine at making little programs that integrate with an existing API to do some small task. Management has always overestimated the effort to develop that kind of thing and underestiamted the effort to develop applications with GUIs because... user interfaces are the Vietnam of computer science.

    The greatest danger of the current time is that the likes of Salesforce and LinkedIn who have something interesting behind an API or web site try to lock down access so instead of using competitive high-quality AI agents we're stuck with the brain damaged AI agents they want to force on us.

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    • niel_hu 16 hours ago
      Yeah, totally agree. But I don't think they can keep it locked down any more, with the rise of computer use agents, the boundary between interfaces designed for humans and those designed for computers is becoming increasingly blurred.
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      • PaulHoule 16 hours ago
        Last year I was talking with somebody about business plans and we were talking about using browser extensions for social news applications to get around paywalls, another part of the "lockdown economy".

        I have an "image sorter" that ingests image galleries, it used to use a bookmarklet that cued a webcrawler but after a decade of having my time as a user wasted clicking on those Cloudflare thingies I finally had it get in the way of my webcrawler.

        I was talking about options w/ Junie and it suggested, "why not write a browser extension?" and I'm like "is that hard?" and it says "no" and 20 minutes later I have a prototype browser extension.

        So that plug-in you're talking about where an AI can see directly into your browser is another option, another is vibe-coding a custom browser extension. I think it was always pretty easy to write a browser extension but I had I done it myself my usual scholarly way I'd spend a few hours reading documentation before I started coding and never realized just how simple it is... Just the way people are discovering web crawlers and API integrations are easier than they thought.

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        • OkayPhysicist 15 hours ago
          There really isn't hours worth of material to put together a browser extension. You can read all the relevant docs in tops an hour, but you can follow the MDN tutorial on it to get the "inject some Javascript into pages with a url matching this pattern" level in less than 10 minutes.
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          • skydhash 14 hours ago
            Also most extensions are open sources. You can hack something from just glancing at the code of some samples.
  • andrei_says_ 15 hours ago
    Did you create a new extension or a custom script for an existing one?
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    • niel_hu 14 hours ago
      Neither. I asked claude through extension to modify the page directly
  • verdverm 15 hours ago
    Rovo is sad you never pick it for these kinds of things
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    • niel_hu 15 hours ago
      Rovo from atlassian? no thanks.