Slap Links: My First Fully Vibecoded Chrome Extension

At the start of this year I set myself a small challenge: build something random every 1 or 2 months just to learn and try new stuff. Q1 went into writing a book about building a NES emulator from scratch in Crystal after I’d built one myself and realized most of the existing material out there assumed you already knew low-level programming and hardware inside out.

After that I was about to start the next idea, but then I remembered that the non-compete clause from my previous job is still in effect, so I had to drop it and pick something else. I had two other things on the list:

• ADS-B Station: a small device that picks up signals from planes flying around the city and shows them on an OLED display, all stuffed inside a 3D printed case.
• 3D printed RC plane: a tiny RC plane I’d print and pair with my own flight controller, so I could fly it more like a GTA-style arcade game while the controller translates intent into actual control surface signals.

Both of those need a 3D printer, and I don’t have one right now (well, I bought an Ender 3 a couple years ago, but I was too dumb to calibrate it and ended up selling it, waiting until I can justify a Bambu Lab P1S 😅). So both got pushed for later in the year.

So I started looking around for something I could just build on a laptop and ship. Around that time I kept seeing Slap Mac popping up on my feed, and I thought it’d be funny to do a similar idea but for Chrome users. That’s how SlapLinks was born.

What is SlapLinks?

The slogan is “A Chrome extension to reduce your productivity”, and it really lives up to it 🤣. For the first week after shipping it I caught myself clicking random links just to test the thing out, basically becoming any phishing hacker’s dream user.

Here’s a quick video of it in action:

SlapLinks doing its thing

If that’s at least a little bit funny to you, you can grab it from the Chrome Web Store. If not, fair enough, it’s a dumb project, that’s the whole point.

Vibecoding takeaways

This was the first project I built fully through vibecoding. I had no idea what it actually takes to build a Chrome extension (yes, it’s not a complex thing, but I’d never opened the docs), and I still ended up with the model doing things like:

• Building a minimal hello world extension and walking me through how to load it locally for testing (didn’t know about that flow at all).
• Iterating really fast, like seconds per change instead of minutes.
• Web-searching monetization options that actually work in my country.
• Eating images, videos, and random files and converting/compressing them into the right assets without me ever opening a free online converter. That alone probably saved me an hour of clicking around sketchy websites.
• Building a landing page in parallel, simple enough that I could host it on GitHub Pages with zero server-side stuff.
• Resizing the landing page to different screen sizes in the background so I didn’t have to keep checking mobile myself.
• Walking me through publishing on the Chrome Web Store, which has a bunch of small “did you sign this? did you upload that?” gotchas.

None of those are crazy on their own, but stacked together they cut the boring part of shipping a side project down to almost nothing.

On the “AI hype” thing

I know everyone is tired of hearing about how AI is changing everything, and I get it. I sat through the Blockchain era, then the NFT era, then the Metaverse era. Most of those felt like solutions looking for a problem. This one actually feels different. The way people work and ship things is changing fast enough that you can feel it month to month, which I can’t honestly say about any of the previous waves.

I won’t go too deep on this because there are smarter people talking about it, but if you want a more grounded take from someone who isn’t a typical web dev, I really recommend this video from The Cherno. He’s a game engine developer, so he comes at it from a totally different angle than the usual “I made a SaaS in 3 hours” hot takes.