SWYoon Labs

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 ...

Fully revised · July 2026. This post replaces the original five-part "dev diary" teaser with a single, complete guide: why I built Side Panel Clock, how to install and use it, how the code works, and how to put it to work in your own day. I spend most of my working day inside the browser, and all day long I kept doing the same tiny things: glancing at the clock, working out what time it was for a teammate three time zones away, and starting a quick timer so a task wouldn't quietly eat an hour. None of these are hard. The problem is that each one pulled me away from what I was doing. The OS clock meant looking off-screen. A world-clock site meant a new tab. A timer meant yet another tab or a phone app I'd forget to check. Individually trivial; together, a steady drip of small interruptions. So I built Side Panel Clock — a small Chrome extension that puts a clock, a world clock, a timer, and a Pomodoro into the browser sidebar, one glance away with zero context...

The problem: Useful information was in the browser, but my notes were always somewhere else. Simple Side Note began as an attempt to remove that small, repeated interruption. The interruption I kept accepting While reading documentation, studying English, or comparing an AI answer with a source, I frequently found one sentence worth keeping. Saving it should have been trivial. Instead, I had to leave the page, locate a notes app, find the right document, paste the text, and then reconstruct where I had stopped reading. None of those actions was difficult. The problem was repetition. Each context switch made it slightly less likely that I would capture the idea at all. I wanted a notepad that remained beside the current page rather than replacing it. Why the Chrome side panel fits Chrome's side panel gives an extension a narrow, persistent surface next to ordinary web content. A note can stay visible while the active tab changes, so the reading material and the writing su...