Every good article has at least three concepts I only half-understand. I used to open tabs to look them up — then forget to come back, or come back and lose the thread. Skipping past unfamiliar terms is faster but leaves you with a shallow read you won't remember.
So I built rabbitholes: a Chrome extension that renders an explanation from Claude Haiku 4.5 in a shadow-DOM tooltip next to your cursor when you highlight text. The shadow DOM matters — it doesn't touch the host page's styles or scripts, so it works on dense article layouts without breaking anything.
The part I actually use most: every explanation is itself explorable. Click any word in the response to query it. Drag across a phrase to take that as your next query. A counter increments each time you go deeper.
That counter turned into something I didn't expect. The Wikipedia philosophy game — clicking the first link in any article until you reach 'Philosophy' — exists because knowledge has deep common roots. With rabbitholes, you can play the same game on any page, on any term, and the extension gives you a shareable trail of your path when you're done. I've ended up three hops into 'modus ponens' starting from a post about distributed systems.
Two other details worth knowing:
- The globe icon re-answers your query enriched with Brave Search results, with source chips you can click. Useful when you want citations, not just an explanation.
- Zero telemetry, no intermediary server. API requests go directly from your browser to api.anthropic.com. Your Anthropic key lives in chrome.storage.sync and never leaves the browser.
Code and install instructions at https://github.com/robertnowell/rabbitholes
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