tl;dr;

Claude for Chrome saved me close to an hour. Three wins: Grafana panel overrides, ArgoCD finalizer patching, and Cloudflare Pages setup. Browser-integrated AI assistance is here and it works.

The Trigger

Just yesterday I read about Simon Willison’s success with Claude for Chrome. He was stuck with Cloudflare UI and Claude did a great job navigating it. Coincidentally, I had my own troubles with Cloudflare UI on the same day - but solved them the old school way. Clicking the same pages and navigation bars repeatedly until I arrived at insights that helped me configure custom DNS for my Pages.

I did, however, get stuck with Grafana.

Claude in Chrome

Win #1: Grafana Panel Legends

I like to give custom legends to metrics on my panels as this greatly enhances usability. While experimenting with the Sentry data source, I realised it doesn’t natively support metric legends and generates a rather unappealing EventsStats (sentry). I knew that panels support the concept of overrides, but a quick look around didn’t ring any bells and there are A LOT OF OPTIONS.

Grafana panel with custom Sentry legend

I launched Claude for Chrome.

Mentioned what I was seeing and what I wanted it to look like instead. Watched it propose a plan which was sensible and allowed it to proceed. It is a bit difficult to watch - feels like those videos with robots lifting things. Something so natural and smooth to a human is an immense challenge for the machine.

I got distracted by Slack. Only a couple of minutes later I noticed my panel was working as expected. Claude had kindly summarised how it was done, so I learned from this interaction rather than just outsourcing all the work to a black box.

Grafana panel with custom legends

Win #2: ArgoCD Finalizer

Same day. An ArgoCD application was stuck deleting due to a finalizer issue. Let Claude click around the UI to arrive at the conclusion that the ArgoCD application resource needed patching to remove the finalizer. Something I’ve done many times for vanilla Kubernetes resources, but not for Argo apps.

Win #3: Cloudflare Pages

To publish this blog post I needed to configure Cloudflare Pages with GitHub connectivity for automatic builds and deployments. The Cloudflare UI confused me - I couldn’t figure out how to connect my existing Pages project to a GitHub repository.

Claude helped me realise I needed to re-create the Pages project with GitHub integration from the start. Another 30 minutes saved on figuring out Cloudflare’s UI patterns.

The x1000 Lens

This win feels inconsequential, but I like to look at things through the x1000 lens. What if Claude was 1000 times faster, cheaper, smarter? With this lens, I’ll have very little left to do. While we aren’t there yet, we are moving in that direction.

In the meanwhile, I’ll continue exploring Claude for Chrome and giving it more of the “can’t bother to figure it out myself” tasks.

Not bad for the first try. Browser-integrated AI that can see what you see and click what you’d click is a different beast from copy-pasting context into a chat window. The friction reduction is real.

Better learn carpentry.