I Built a Chrome Extension With ChatGPT in Under an Hour — Here's How It Went

Early last week I dove back into building n8n workflows again and working on a new and improved version of the 'Biz Brains' RAG solution I built last year.

Then on Thursday I came up with an idea to create a Chrome Extension to allow myself/clients to manually trigger workflows via webhooks instead of the workflow having to repeatedly poll a Coda Table or Gmail Inbox all day long.

I turned to ChatGPT and gave it instructions to create the extension to be vanilla and configurable for each person that installs it. I explained in detail how I wanted the user interface to function and why to give it context.

After some back and forth, ChatGPT wrote the code for 3 files: manifest.json, popup.html, and popup.js

How I Tested:
1. Created a folder and added those 3 files to it.
2. Loaded it into Chrome
2.1 Went to: chrome://extensions/
2.2 Turned on Developer Mode
2.3 Clicked 'Load Unpacked'
2.4 Selected my folder
3. Now a new "W" icon appears in my extensions list ➜ Pinned it
4. Clicked the extension to display the menu
4.1 Added name and webhook URL, then clicked Save
4.2 Now I click 'Run' next to the webhook name I want to fire off

Build Results:
First version ➜ icons displayed as unreadable garbage text.
Second version ➜ resulted in crashing chrome completely.
Third version ➜ worked like a charm!

I iterated through each version by simply uploading a screenshot of the issue and explaining what was happening.

The process took perhaps 45-60 mins.

Impact:
A client can trigger a workflow to fire anytime they want. So, if I've built them a RAG system to ingest their company's knowledge and they've just added a new file that needs to be accessible via a public facing chat interface on their website, they can trigger the workflow to ingest it immediately. Normally you'd have to set a pre-determined poll such as every 1 minute, 5 minutes, or 30 minutes etc.

Next Step:
During testing I've been loading the Chrome Extension in Developer Mode. Now I need to add it to the Chrome Web Store so that:
1) The extension doesn't disappear every time I restart Chrome.
2) It permanently saves my webhook entries.
3) I can quickly and easily install it for any client.

15/04/2026 Update ➜ I've now added my Instant Webhook extension to the Chrome Web Store and you can get it here.