Cobra Chicken

Ever been too productive? Cobra Chicken can fix that. Introducing a new way to browse Chrome, with built in misinformation and UX violations.

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Inspiration

Quality-of-life features and the advent of AI has made people too productive, to serve as a counterweight we have made Cobra Chicken. The inspiration to build Cobra Chicken came from seeing people happy and productive using Chrome. As an internet explore user, this makes me upset so our team and I sought to fix "happy" and "productive" users in Chrome.

What it does

Cobra Chicken is the most useless chrome extension out there. Its features are built with your inconvenience in mind. Straight from your browser, it has the following capabilities:

  • Rewrites Reddit posts and comments to have personas such as "maliciously disinformative", "blantantly misinformed", "caveman speak" and "insomniac"
  • Rewrites X.com posts to spread love 🕊️💖 and positivity✌️✨
  • Modifies popular news sites (CNBC, CBC, CNN) to spread misinformation about current events within articles.
  • Randomly modifies cursor size
  • Slowly makes your tabs (even inactive ones!) more blurry every few seconds, up until they become entirely unreadable. You must refresh the page to unblur.
  • Replaces Geesehack links with QHacks (Truly a useless feature!!!)
  • Opens up any of 5 random search engines when opening a new tab
  • On an interval, a random metal gear solid sound effect will play and trigger one of the following inconvenient events:
    • Tab Scrambler
    • Deletes a random tab
    • Opens the GeeseHacks/QHacks website, replacing the current view
    • Removes all punctuation on a page, and converts all text to lowercase
    • Throws fake error pop-ups, dismissing said error blurs the current page
    • Replaces all text on page with brainrot language

How we built it

We built this magnificent pile of trash using the Chrome API. The Chrome API has everything included, and made it easy to change the current state of chrome. Any text modification (except for punctuation) is sent to the OpenAI gpt-4o-mini model with a engineered prompt, where it's result is parsed and displayed where needed.

Challenges we ran into

3 of 4 of our team members did not know Javascript prior to this weekend. This was a challenge as Vanilla Javascript, especially in the browser and understanding the context vs extension scripts, is difficult to pickup immediately. Errors are non-descriptive if they even show up and type documentation is unreliable, but making the switch over to TS or another technology would have been more difficult for everyone, so we stuck with it. In the end, everyone learned a new language, and figured out how to make something cool.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have made something truly awful. Cobra Chicken is masterful at what it does. Cobra Chicken makes using chrome so incredibly frustrating that no one in their right minds would try it. The popups, blurring, shuffling, deletion of tabs, etc. make it a truly unreliable un-fun experience that destroys productivity. Next however, the text modification ended up being really awesome. Taking reddit as an example, we figured out how to get all posts and comments (and continue getting them as you expand/scroll), parse them, then send them to ChatGPT with a persona randomizer. Fine tuning this prompt and process to make it perfect has completely changed the reddit experience, browsing the site is incredibly fun with all of the different wacky personas. Honourable Mention is seeing Twitter posts about losing money in crypto starting with "hey besties✌️✨".

What we learned

We learned how to create a complete chrome extension. Due to the nature of our project, we used a lot of different tooling of the API.

Surprisingly as well, we learned how cheap Generative AI is today. Using the OpenAI gpt-4o-mini model to browse Reddit or X, sending it literally web pages full of text, at the end of testing and usage it cost 0.45$ for all 4 of us to use constantly throughout the hacking hours.

What's next for Cobra Chicken

There is no limits to Cobra Chicken. Imagine a web that is fully transformed by Cobra Chicken to be utterly useless due to it replacing all worthwhile information with believable misinformation. Cobra Chicken can be as annoying as possible, and there is no limit to what chrome will allow us to do to annoy the user, only the moral gray area of getting close to making literal malware.

The only thing stopping

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