Turn your best AI prompts into one-click tools in Chrome

Overall sentiment

• Mixed reaction: some see it as a genuinely useful productivity feature; others view it as another hype-driven “AI platform” move with unclear long‑term value.
• Several users like the idea conceptually but are wary of committing to a Google feature that might later change, be paywalled, or be deprecated.

Permissions, privacy, and security

• Strong concern about coarse permissions, especially around Drive/Gmail: users want granular, read‑only, corpus‑specific access rather than broad personalization on/off.
• Fears that integrating agents into the browser reopens security risks that years of sandboxing tried to mitigate, especially via prompt injection (any page text steering the agent).
• Debate over whether this is “APT-like” or just a controlled agent; some argue current mitigations are insufficient and injections remain unsolved.
• Worry that Gemini actions tied to personal data (e.g., Gmail) could be abused by malicious prompts if misdesigned.

Use cases and enthusiasm

• Concrete personal uses: automating calendar entries, TripIt / flight tracker updates, pulling alt text and captions, filling out recurring forms, summarizing documents, and structured customer‑support replies.
• Some see it as a way to replace brittle, site‑specific scripts now that many sites lack usable APIs and are hostile to traditional automation.
• Users with large prompt collections like the idea of “prompt macros” / one‑click skills living in the browser.

Skepticism about UX and reliability

• Doubts that “best prompts” are stable or reproducible, given inconsistent LLM responses.
• Concern that natural‑language prompting is being overused where explicit query languages or code would be clearer, faster, and more auditable.
• Requests that skills output actual code or visible logic so users can review what runs against real data.

Ecosystem, incentives, and ads

• Some suspect the feature mainly drives usage of Gemini, a paid product with a free tier.
• Concerns that browser‑level AI extraction further discourages content creation by keeping users away from original sites and their monetization.
• Parallel discussion on ad blocking and alternative funding models (tip jars, “value‑adding” ads), with many expressing hostility to ads in any form.

Technical directions (WebMCP)

• Noted that using raw DOM/HTML is brittle; WebMCP is cited as a future standard to expose structured tools/data to agents, potentially making browser skills more reliable and useful, especially for local‑first apps.