EnhanceGPT 0.1.0: A Small Extension for a Better ChatGPT Workflow
I recently submitted EnhanceGPT 0.1.0 to the Chrome Web Store for review.
EnhanceGPT is a small Chrome extension I built to improve the everyday ChatGPT experience. It adds a few workflow features that feel like they should already exist: a lightweight conversation outline, bulk conversation management, and saved prompt snippets. It blends in the original user interface like it’s original.
This first release is small, but it solves several real annoyances I kept running into while using ChatGPT every day.
Why I Built It
The first problem is navigation.
When a ChatGPT conversation gets long, finding a previous section becomes surprisingly painful. You remember that you talked about something earlier, but the only way to get back to it is to keep scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling.
For short chats, this is fine. But for research, debugging, writing, planning, or long technical discussions, the conversation quickly becomes more like a document. At that point, an outline is not just a nice-to-have feature. It becomes the difference between being able to reuse the conversation and wanting to start over.
That is why EnhanceGPT adds a lightweight outline for long conversations. The goal is simple: help you jump between important parts of the conversation without fighting the scroll wheel.
The second problem is conversation management.
ChatGPT’s native interface is good for starting new chats, but it is not great when you want to clean up old ones. I personally do not use Projects very often. Most of the time, I just start a new conversation directly.
Over time, this creates a messy sidebar with too many conversations.
When I finally want to delete old chats, I usually realize there are already too many of them. Organizing them would be an impossible job, so I often end up doing nothing. And I suspect many people use ChatGPT in the same way.
EnhanceGPT adds bulk-select support for conversations in the sidebar, so cleaning up old chats becomes much faster.
Harder Than I Expected
Building this extension turned out to be much harder than I originally expected.
At first, it looked like a simple browser extension project: read some page content, add a few buttons, store some user settings, and update the UI.
In practice, ChatGPT’s page is dynamic and complex. The interface uses virtualized lists in many places, which means not all conversations or messages are present in the DOM at the same time. Some content only exists when it is visible. Some elements are mounted and unmounted frequently. Some data needs to be inferred from the DOM, while other parts need to be fetched from API responses.
Because of this, it needs to observe the DOM, read visible UI state, fetch conversation data, and maintain its own internal conversation tree.
Race conditions happened often. Sometimes the DOM changed before the extension finished reading it. Sometimes React re-rendered a section and removed elements the extension had just touched. Sometimes the sidebar state changed while the extension was still updating its own data model. At some point, I felt like I had used useEffect so much that I never wanted to see another dependency array again.
What Is Included in 0.1.0
EnhanceGPT 0.1.0 currently focuses on a few core workflow improvements:
- Bulk-select conversations from the ChatGPT sidebar
- Delete or manage multiple conversations more efficiently
- View a lightweight outline for long conversations
- Save and reuse prompt snippets from the composer
- Keep the extension visually close to the native ChatGPT interface
The design goal is to stay out of the way. I do not want EnhanceGPT to feel like a separate app sitting on top of ChatGPT. I want it to feel like a small set of missing native features.
Submitted for Chrome Web Store Review
The extension has now been submitted to the Chrome Web Store for review.
This is the first public release, so I expect there will still be rough edges. ChatGPT’s interface changes frequently, and browser extensions that integrate directly with a live web app need constant maintenance.
That is also one of the reasons I built EnhanceGPT as a focused extension instead of a large, complicated product. The smaller the scope, the easier it is to keep it stable and adapt when the page changes.
What Comes Next
For future versions, I want to keep improving the features that make ChatGPT easier to use in daily workflows, like exporting a conversation, outline showing branch node so you can switch between node easily, and more.
EnhanceGPT started from my own frustration with long conversations and messy sidebars. Version 0.1.0 is only the beginning, but it already makes ChatGPT feel more manageable for the way I actually use it.
Hopefully, it will be useful for others too.
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