Anyway, one more mundane but intriguingly useful tool: AI-generated bookmarklets.
A bookmarklet is basically a “mod” to an existing webpage/website, like a little script that gets injected to add new features to a site or override some existing functionality. They used to be popular in the 2000s or so. Now AIs can trivially write even moderately complex ones.
Here’s an example from another thread: Is there a way to get a list of more than the top 24 posters in a thread? - #3 by Reply
That lists all the posters in a given SDMB thread, counts how many times they’ve posted, and points you to all their posts in that thread. It only took 2-3 prompts and a few minutes to make (with Gemini or Claude, I forget). It’s just a random example.
Elsewhere, I’ve used similar bookmarklets to do trivial data scrapes, like looking at a page full of monthly data with prev/next arrows, and having an AI write a bookmarklet to automatically page through all available years and download a CSV of it instead.
The Web is one of the last remaining open/viewable/modifiable forms of software we still have, and bookmarklets are a simple way to exploit that openness. Userscripts would be the more “official”, but more complex, way to do these. Bookmarklets are just drag-and-drop by contrast.