Claude without leaving

The Build

I built the relay first because I understood it. Chrome extension reads the page, sends to Cloudflare, Cloudflare fans it out to a web panel. I finished it and then wrote down what I actually needed: something still visible when I switch to Figma.

A web page lives in a tab. It disappears the moment you leave. I had built the thing I was trying to escape.

Deleting the relay removed the public endpoint, the round trip to the internet, and the Cloudflare account. Two processes on the same machine talking to each other over localhost don’t need any of that.

The protocol stayed identical. Every message type, turn.start, turn.delta, turn.end, the same. The extension never knew where the server was. Building the wrong version first is what made the right version obvious.

Claude.ai shows a moving window onto the conversation. Only the messages near your scroll position exist. I assumed the page was the conversation. It isn’t.

I didn’t design these up front. Each appeared after something broke. Click a marker to see what the bubble looked like before the fix, and what it cost.

A week in, every reply appeared twice. Four fixes. Each one broke something new.

If a conversation has context in older messages, the bubble can’t reach it. Loading older messages means scrolling the claude.ai page. But the bubble sits in the background while you use it, and Chrome suspends rendering in background tabs. The scroll lands. Nothing redraws. The context stays out of reach.