SWYoon Labs

Most advice about studying English while reading assumes you will stop and write things down. In practice you do not, and the reason is not laziness. Stopping costs more than the note is worth in that moment. You are three paragraphs into an article. You hit a phrase you half-know. To capture it you have to leave the page, find wherever your notes live, wait for it to load, type the phrase, remember the sentence it came from, type that too, then find your way back and rebuild the thread you dropped. That is thirty to sixty seconds and a broken train of thought for one phrase. Do it five times in an article and you have stopped reading and started doing data entry. So you skip it. And a week later you meet the same phrase again and have the same faint feeling of recognition, which is exactly where you were before. This post is about a workflow that removes the cost of capturing instead of trying to make you more disciplined about paying it. The rule that makes it work Capture mus...

There is a lot of writing about building software with AI, and almost all of it stops at the demo. Someone prompts a model, a working prototype appears, the screenshot goes up, and that is the end of the story. I wanted to write the other part. I built a Chrome extension called Simple Side Note with AI assistance, published it to the Chrome Web Store, and kept shipping updates to it for seven weeks. This post is the actual record of that: what the commit history really looks like, where the AI was genuinely fast, and — the part I find more interesting — the specific decisions it never made for me. If you are wondering whether AI can take you past the prototype and into something people install, this is one honest data point. What got built Simple Side Note is a notepad that lives in the Chrome side panel. You open it next to whatever you are reading, write, and it stays there as you move between tabs. It saves memos locally, lets you pin the ones you want to keep, and exports to ...