Sorry if this isn’t allowed, I wasn’t sure where I could post this. Thought this community would appreciate it the most.
Anyways, I built an extension for FF while I’m applying to jobs. I noticed when applying at the same company again, the applications were basically the same and asking the same questions. So I built the extension that will auto save the data submitted to the application to reference when seeing the same question again later.
It is still a WIP, it will recognize the application platform/page about 80% of the time and save on submittal, and if its not confident enough for auto-save there is a manual save option as well. There are some rough edges where the fields may not be saved correctly or bugs like that, but I’m at a point where I’d love for some others to test it out and get a better idea of what platforms are being missed or fields, etc.
So if you are job hunting, or know someone that is, please check out AnswerHoard and let me know what you think!
Couple concerns out the gate:
- privacy: everything is saved ONLY on your browser. I don’t get any of it unless you share it with me with your feedback.
- permissions: turns out it’s a pain in the ass to try to recognize a job application page. Everyone does it differently, with different URLs, multi-page, SPA, in-frame, etc. So as of now the extension runs on every page to detect if it is an application submission page or not. Again, I don’t get ANY data from the pages you view/data you submit. You can read the privacy policy here
- if you’d like to report pages that were not detected, detected but not saved, saved but the fields are wrong, please feel free to submit an issue here
Thanks to anyone who checks it out! Sorry again mods if this is not allowed
Instead of running on every page, could you have it be triggered manually? For example, visit page, click extension > run.
That’s a valid option. The whole thing in my head was that it was supposed to be automated, and eventually figure out how to narrow down the pages where it runs. I know seeing the permissions to collect data on every page just sounds scary lol but I was hoping the fact that the extension isn’t touching any kind of backend or anything external would balance it out. I will think about that though, thanks for the input!
Also, fuck js forms. Browsers can save form content, except on dynamically loaded/or named ones. And they are more brittle to boot. User experience, lol, what’s that? Hurry and bolt the site out, using a dotzend frameworks to be faster.
not a customer, but you’d do well to state front and center whether or to what extent this was vibeshat. same should go for every “I built” post, imo.
edit: typo
So to play devils advocate about it all, is this just for anyone that doesn’t want to support anything that uses any amount of AI, or is there a certain threshold that acceptable (would vary between people I assume)? I released the code to show that no data is sent or collected anywhere else, does it actually matter how the code was written?
To be completely upfront, as I said in another comment I’m new to extensions as I only have worked on one before that is super super simple. So I did use cursor to get a boilerplate template started so I could figure out what I needed and what I had to work with. Then I used it to bounce ideas off of and had a couple different versions of how it worked before getting to what I have now. Was some of the code ai generated? Yep. Was some of it written by me? Yep.
If the question was really, did I vibe code this over a weekend and just tell the agent “build me an extension” then no that’s not what happened. I probably worked on this over a month or so in my free time, using cursor to figure out stuff I didn’t know, and save some time of looking things up the old school way.
If that turns anyone off to the extension, it’s all good. This isn’t a business venture where I expect any money to come in from it. I wanted to work on something useful and hope it proves helpful to anyone who tries it out
Is there a reason to believe this was written by AI?
Source?
my bad - misunderstood. https://github.com/stevePriceDev/answerhoard-privacy
That’s going to be very useful! Can you post a link to your github/Codeberg repo so I can verify I’m able to run it securely?
Sure! I added the code to my repo here https://github.com/stevePriceDev/answerhoard-privacy
Haven’t browsers been able to store and recall form fields for decades at this point? How is this different from the built-in browser functionality?
True, and I’ve used the browser auto fill for name/email/number or the extension Simplify that can build a profile to auto fill things like LinkedIn URL, GitHub URL, things like that. But I haven’t had either save an answer for things like salary range, “name a project you worked on/proud of” things like that, plus a lot will ask the same question worded differently. Maybe the browser can save those, or premium Simplify, but I haven’t seen it or done it so why not build something that helps me out and I can show off on my resume.
I’m new to extensions so I’m open for any feedback I can get, just a broke dev trying to find a job in this job market lol
