Too many ads: using AI for something useful
141 small tools that run in your tab, and an honest account of what the AI actually did
[Almost Ad] This one is about jsglobe, which I make. jsglobe.com ↗
Search for a JSON formatter. Go on.
What you get is a page with four ad slots above the tool, a cookie wall, a newsletter pop-up, something asking for notification permission, and a text box that uploads whatever you paste into it to a server you know nothing about. The tool itself is about forty lines of code. Everything else on that page exists to make money from you being there.
I had been living with that for years, the way you live with a noisy fridge. Then one afternoon I needed to decode a token while debugging something sensitive, hesitated over the paste button, and realised what the hesitation was: I did not trust the page with the thing I was about to give it.
That is a bad position to be in over a forty line program.
What jsglobe is
A collection of small tools that run entirely in your browser. There are 141 of them at the time of writing. Formatters, converters, encoders, hashers, generators, colour tools, image tools, text tools, the usual kit.
The rules I set are short.
- Nothing uploads. The work happens in your tab, on your machine. If you paste a token in, it never crosses the network.
- No sign-up. There is nothing to create an account for.
- No ads. Not fewer ads, none.
- Open source, under a permissive licence, so you can read what it does or run your own copy.
That is the whole product. It is not clever. It is only unusual because the economics of the web pushed everyone else somewhere worse.
Where the AI part comes in
Here is the part I want to be precise about, because it is easy to make it sound grander than it is.
Writing one of these tools takes under an hour. Writing a hundred and forty of them, each with its own edge cases, keyboard behaviour, error states, and translations into ten languages, is not a weekend. Before this year I would not have attempted it alone.
AI assistance is what made the long tail affordable. Not by inventing anything, and not by writing the site for me: by taking the fiftieth variation on a parsing routine, the repetitive translation pass, the test cases for an encoder I had already specified, and doing them at a speed that made the whole set viable instead of a nice idea I abandoned at tool number twelve.
That is the modest version of using AI for good, and I think the modest version is the honest one. There is a great deal of noise about what these tools will do to the world. Meanwhile they quietly removed the economic reason that free utilities have to be covered in advertising, because the cost of building the hundredth one fell through the floor.
If a thing is cheap enough to build, it does not need to be monetised to exist.
I will not pretend it was a smooth collaboration either.
The first thirty tools flew. Somewhere around the fortieth, the work stopped being writing and became negotiating. I would ask for one change and get three. I would get an elegant rewrite of a function that was already finished, and a subtle bug in the one I had actually asked about.
A fair share of those hours was me typing the word “no” in longer and longer sentences.
Somewhere in there it stopped being pair programming and turned into two people reaching for the same mouse and keyboard, both convinced the other one had broken it.
Still worth it. 141 tools exist that otherwise would not, and the arguing is cheaper than the advertising would have been.
What it costs to run
Hosting a pile of static files is close to free. There is no database, no queue, no per-user cost, no support burden from accounts that do not exist. Anyone can clone it and host their own. There is no business model to protect, which is why there is nothing on the page trying to extract something from you.
I am not claiming virtue here. I built the thing I wanted to use and made it public because it cost nothing extra to do so.
The point
The next time you paste something confidential into a free online tool, look at what else is on the page. Every one of those elements is there because somebody had to pay for the page to exist.
Making that cost disappear is, for now, the most useful thing I have done with AI.