alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Hover – IDE style hover documentation on any webpage
I thought it would be interesting to have ID style hover docs outside the IDE.
Hover is a Chrome extension that gives you IDE style hover tooltips on any webpage: documentation sites, ChatGPT, Claude, etc.
How it works: - When a code block comes into view, the extension detects tokens and sends the code to an LLM (via OpenRouter or custom endpoint) - The LLM generates documentation for tokens worth documenting, which gets cached - On hover, the cached documentation is displayed instantly
A few things I wanted to get right: - Website permissions are granular and use Chrome's permission system, so the extension only runs where you allow it - Custom endpoints let you skip OpenRouter entirely – if you're at a company with its own infra, you can point it at AWS Bedrock, Google AI Studio, or whatever you have
Built with TypeScript, Vite, and the Chrome extension APIs. Coming to the Chrome Web Store soon.
Would love feedback on the onboarding experience and general UX – there were a lot of design decisions I wasn't sure about.
Happy to answer questions about the implementation.
Comments
Since these are called "tooltips" you might want to use the term more prominently.
Nice idea, but unless it's using up-to-date docs it's likely to introduce a lot of confusion, especially if you're reading docs to find out what changed between versions. You really need to be sending the code and the version of the software that the person reading the page is looking at.
interesting idea for a 1.0. Using https://context7.com/ might be the right next move here.
Also look into https://cht.sh/
Remember: incorrect (misleading) documentation is worse than no documentation.
What this might be better for is use-cases that don't require extreme precision. Imagine it for learning language or reading sophisticated academic literature. For example, https://archive.org/details/pdfy-TJ7HxrAly-MtUP4B/page/n111/...
Stuff like that is hard and every tool to make the complicated more legible I'd embrace.
Firefox has built-in link previews with AI. Hold mouse1 on a link.
> the extension detects tokens and sends the code to an LLM
> The LLM generates documentation
so, not documentation? Why not write your own engine and detect the official docs? e.g. docs.rs would do this wonderfully