Tangent — Explainers for AI Chats

Tangent notices when you ask an AI assistant about something worth understanding, and finds YouTube Shorts that explain it. Ask "how can I reverse a linked list?" and a button appears in the side panel: "Find explainers: reverse linked list." Click it and you get a handful of 15 to 90 second Shorts on that exact topic, ranked for brevity and relevance, playable right there beside the conversation. Ignore it and nothing happens at all. WHY IT IS NOT A DISTRACTION Nothing plays unless you ask. A message raises a button, not a video. Working out the topic happens on your own device and costs nothing, so ignoring the button is free — and that is the normal case. It knows a question from a chore. "What is photosynthesis" gets a button. "Rerun the tests", "commit this", "yes" get nothing at all. No feed. A fixed set of results. No autoplay, no recommendations, no "up next", no infinite scroll. It is a handful of clips about one topic, and then it stops. YOU GET THE LAST WORD The phrase it will search sits in an editable box above the button, already filled in. Most of the time it is right and you just click. When it is not quite what you meant — or you want to narrow it — you type over it and search that instead. HOW IT PICKS Tangent reads the message you just typed and works out what concept is in it — locally, on your machine, with no network call. It recognises hundreds of technical and scientific concepts, and it deliberately stays quiet when a message is a chore rather than a question. Results are then ranked for what actually helps in a short break: brevity, how well the title matches your topic, and variety of creators. Clickbait and engagement bait are pushed down. PRIVACY Tangent reads only the message you just typed, and only on AI chat sites. Not the assistant's replies, not your history, not any other site. Before anything is searched, code blocks, file paths, URLs, email addresses, IP addresses and anything shaped like an API key or password is stripped out. If a message looks like it contains a credential, Tangent discards it entirely and offers nothing. What reaches YouTube is a short phrase such as "database migration postgres explained" — never your message. There is no Tangent server, no analytics, no tracking and no account. Everything is stored in your own browser. Full privacy policy: https://dipeshtripathi13.github.io/tangent/privacy.html WHERE IT WORKS Tangent runs on the major AI chat assistants. The exact sites are declared in this listing's permissions and shown in the extension's own settings, where each one can be switched off individually. It does nothing at all on any other site. SETUP Tangent searches with your own free YouTube Data API key, so your usage is yours and nothing is routed through anyone else's service. Click the Tangent icon on any chat page and the panel walks you through creating one; it takes a few minutes and costs nothing. Google grants 100 searches per day per key. Tangent stops at 90 to leave you headroom, and reuses saved results so the same topic never costs twice. WORTH KNOWING - A free YouTube Data API key is required. There is no shared key, by design. - Clips play inside the panel through a small open-source page, because YouTube will not play inside a browser extension panel directly. That page does nothing but embed the official player, and you can host your own copy or turn inline playback off. - Tangent narrows the page so the panel sits beside your conversation. If a site's layout reacts badly, you can switch that off in settings. OPEN SOURCE MIT licensed. Every claim above can be checked by reading the source: https://github.com/Dipeshtripathi13/tangent Tangent is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google, YouTube, Anthropic or OpenAI.