I built my first Chrome extension as a CS student. Here's what actually surprised me.

I've been building web apps for a while. I thought a Chrome extension would be a weekend project. It was not a weekend project. I'm a CS student and I recently shipped Prompt Helix — a page-aware AI assistant that sits on any webpage. Building it taught me things that no tutorial really prepared me for. So here's the honest version. Manifest V3 is a different world If you're learning from tutorials, half of them are still using Manifest V2. The migration to V3 changed how background scripts work fundamentally service workers replace background pages, and service workers don't persist the way background pages did. This means you can't store state the way you're used to. I lost a solid few days figuring out why my extension kept losing context between actions. If you're starting a Chrome extension today, go straight to the official V3 docs and ignore any tutorial older than 2023. Content script isolation is genuinely weird Your content script runs in the page's context but is isolated fr