AI Bringing Old Dreams to Life

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AI Bringing Old Dreams to Life

07/09/2025

I finally got Stepping Stone developed as a Chrome Extension and it is now published in the Chrome Web Store.

What is it? It's browser navigation tool that let's you pan through a set of bookmark shortcuts. The effect is like, as my tagline goes, "reading your newspaper in some favorite order". Except in digital form of course. Oh - and only on an actual computer desktop. This thing won't work on a phone.

You can read more about it on its "About" page.

The Web Stepper control panel.

I'm less excited that I've published a viable tool for the masses because let's face it, in the time it's taken me to find a path to producing and publishing it since my first iteration in the 90s, people have stopped browsing the web.

There are no masses.

Even so, I was proud of my clunky mid-90s version and wanted to see it live in contemporary form. Even if it might take a niche crowd to ever use it.

The original 1990s something version. It actually worked most of the time!

The kicker is that I didn't actually code this thing in the conventional sense. I happen to lean into Google Gemini and asked, based on recollection of the old one I wrote, if it could produce it. When it shot back that it could, and, even provided some semblance of a working prototype, it was game on for the next three days!

Aside from some tweaking of the text lines here and there in the JavaScript bowels that Google Gemini kicked out, I didn't do any coding at all. Although, by the time I was done, it felt every bit as exhausting as if I had. It had all the drama and creative flush associated with the process and rather revealed how much fun developing in general is for me even if not directly brickmaking the bricks.

There was endless AI prompting, copy/pasting, aforementioned text tweaking, debugging, and so on. And, to get this published in the Chrome Store I needed an entire support website and privacy policy. The website I actually did code - ages ago, being the "Battle Blog" engine. All I had to do was spin up an instance. But AI did everything else including writing me the privacy policy and answering all the technical questions that Google requires for Chrome Store submissions.

I submitted everything late Sunday night and on Tuesday morning, judging from my logs, after about maybe 30 minutes of reviewing my submission, Google approved and published it.

Incredible.

They say coders are going to be obsolete and I now have a better understanding of what that means. I am not sure I buy it entirely still, but, let's face it, I have this albeit rinky-tinky tool that I could easily be charging people for (but am not) with very little practice in JavaScript, let alone the machinations of Chrome's background processes that make my extension work. All just from making suggestions and providing crafty prompts to an AI engine.

The JavaScript I could re-hone myself in in a matter of a few months (I did work with it briefly for a maybe a year or two, then, on a very spotty basis afterwards), but understanding race conditions and browser timings and all the handles and elements that need to come together - forgeddaboutit.

I would have more sympathy for professional coders but can't help see it more pragmatically. After all, didn't coding in the real sense already die like at least a decade ago? What are frameworks and libraries if not just a more manual form of AI? A typical developer out of college doesn't go into a company writing the thing that generates a random number and make the screen go bleep. He uses a framework that he stitches to other things to make a final product. There's no real "coding" so much as there is all that "stitching". So, I'm of the view after this experience, that AI development is just a rung higher on the same ladder.

My original 1990s application was indeed called "Stepping Stone" but the iteration published to the Chrome Web Store is called Web Stepper. It seems that by today there are several software companies and entities out there using "Stepping Stone" and I wanted to avoid stepping on (legal?) toes.

By Dave for Personal Blog.