[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hover - IDE style hover documentation on an...
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Show 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.
Author : sampsonj
Score : 22 points
Date : 2026-01-04 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ramon156 wrote:
| > 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
| sampsonj wrote:
| The LLM approach is simpler and more flexible since it works
| with every library and language out of the box.
|
| Looking up official documentation would require shipping
| sophisticated parsers for each language, plus a way to map
| tokens to their corresponding docs. I'd also need to maintain
| those mappings as libraries evolve and documentation moves.
| Some ecosystems make this easier (Rust with docs.rs), but
| others would be much harder (AWS documentation, for example).
|
| I also want explanations visible directly in hover hints rather
| than linking out to external docs. So even with official
| documentation, I'd need to extract and present the relevant
| content anyway.
|
| Beyond that, the LLM approach adapts to context in ways static
| docs can't. It generates explanations for code within the
| documentation you're reading, and it works on code that doesn't
| compile, like snippets with stubs or incomplete examples.
|
| It could be interesting in the future to look into doing some
| type of hybrid approach where an LLM goes out and searches up
| the documentation, that way it's a little bit more flexible.
| But that would also be a bit slower and more costly.
| nativeit wrote:
| > The LLM approach is simpler
|
| For whom? The whole reason I want to consult docs is to get
| the official documentation on a given topic. How could I
| trust anything it says, and what's to say any earned trust is
| durable over time?
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > For whom?
|
| what is the name for this kind of pointless, lazy,
| selective, quoting that willfully misconstrues what's being
| quoted? the answer to this question is incredibly clear:
| for the developer that created this tool. if that makes you
| unhappy enough to malign them then maybe you should just
| not use it?
| sampsonj wrote:
| lol thank you, I was just going to respond to them. One
| thing I should mention too is that if it were at all
| practical to build without using generative AI, someone
| would have built something similar years ago before LLMs.
| ramon156 wrote:
| > Looking up official documentation would require shipping
| sophisticated parsers for each language,
|
| You could just token match (use tree-sitter or something
| similar) and fetch the official docs. Keep it dead-simple so
| there's no way you can provide false positives (unlike what's
| happening rn where hallucinations will creep in).
|
| > It generates explanation
|
| Again, I _don 't_ want that. It's not a feature, it's a
| limitation that right now gives you fake information.
| nativeit wrote:
| Oh...I guess this isn't the documentation-surfacing droids I'm
| looking for.
|
| I could see getting actual docs being useful. Spitting out the
| delusions of an LLM is pretty well covered already, at least in
| my stack.
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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.
| sampsonj wrote:
| Thank you! I will look into these! Yeah, it could be useful for
| providing explanations of key terms in papers or something
| similar.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Those are great links.
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