I took over stewardship of the Spaces Chrome extension recently (open source repo). Dean, the original developer, no longer wanted to maintain it. Chrome Extension Manifest V3 had caused the extension to be broken for a couple years, and then eventually taken down from the Chrome Web Store. I have been a heavy daily user of this extension for over a decade.

Ok, he wants to sell me on this "Spaces" thing now...

A "Space" is just a named browser window with a set of tabs, for example "Beers to Brew". Now that you've given the Space a name, if you don't immediately need it, just close the browser window and let those beer recipe tabs go, man. Your RAM and CPU will thank you for it. Later, when you want to decide which recipe to brew, reopen the space, and all those tabs magically re-appear. Yep, it's kind of like bookmarks in folders, but better because Spaces automatically remembers as you add/remove tabs from the window.

And in case you're curious, Tab Groups don't quite work for me, I context switch at work so much that I eventually end up with many many Spaces, like 100+. In fact, I still don't know why browsers don't just do what Spaces does by default, but maybe there are fewer people like me with hundreds of tabs open at a time.

Once you get over that hump of closing the window and trusting the extension to do its job you will go from a person who might have hundreds of tabs open to maybe only 20-30 at a time.

Anyway, since I've never written a browser extension before, I thought I'd use it as an opportunity to also pair program with an AI Agent and learn things that way. GitHub offered me Copilot to me for free, and I found Claude Sonnet 4 pretty capable, so I went for it. For some tasks, I'd occasionally swap out the LLM model (Gemini, GPT) and with other tasks I'd use Gemini Code Assist and Gemini CLI. It's good to understand the "personalities" of the models and to try out other agent user interfaces so that you can see where the game changes are.

My experience with this so far has been best described as "working with a variety of eager interns who needs a lot of guidance", matching a lot of other experiences I've read about. Is it saving me time? - oh yes indeed. I mean it's not a total obvious win, but for things like creating unit test suites and things of that nature it's great. Maybe a 2x improvement in velocity? Just be prepared to type at it a lot and to exercise your patience if you're particular.

If you're turning your nose up at this point, I'd suggest you think about the opportunity here. Take advantage of the enormous amounts of free compute that big corporations are laying at your fingertips to move faster and build more, bro. The window of free compute is closing fast.