Web Stepper
Web Stepper, One Way or Another
07/06/2025
It's not yet clear to me if Web Stepper will make it into the Chrome Web Store. Right now it's undergoing review, which, in the best case scenario, will shoot straight through to approval and publish.
But, somehow, I don't think it's going to be that easy. Either it will be rejected out of hand, or, maybe in such a way that I'll be able to mitigate whatever concerns block the process.
Either way, it was fun getting my feet wet with "vibe coding" and using AI to effectively develop the extension. What I really found interesting from the experience was just how it felt like the usual coding project I might traditionally find myself consumed with. The code, even though expertly produced by AI based on my prompts, still required endless debugging and tweaking. Since it was all in JavaScript, a language I can somewhat mold to my needs if I have basic code to start with, given my lack of practice or depth with it, I couldn't pick through and spot obscure problems to just fix them like I might in PHP. There was a lot of log-passing-back-and-forth between Google Gemini and myself to get it to fix things as issues cropped up.
So, this holiday weekend of being consumed with it was no different from being consumed by countless other coding products that I've done myself from scratch. Writing the code outright was just replaced with trying to relate back and forth changes and understanding. And around just the coding, again as with any project, I had to develop a support channel which meant set up an entire new website; write copy, test, and so on and so on.
AI or not, it was all just as exhausting.
In the event I don't get this thing into the store, I'll still use it personally, and, I'll post the source here at the site for those experts who dare to run Chrome in Developer mode, and can thus run it. Web Stepper is for a kind of web user after all, the same kind that is probably comfortable doing that, without blowing up their PC in some malware meltdown.
By webstepper for Web Stepper Home.
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