Kevin Wu wanted to learn Chinese characters fast. Really fast. So he opened Claude Code and started talking into his microphone. Thousands of lines of JavaScript later, he had a custom browser extension that crams etymology, calligraphy videos, tone information, and word morphology directly into his Hack Chinese flashcard interface. No more context-switching between tabs. What used to take 30 seconds now takes under one.
Wu calls it "Character Cyclotron." He's a second-generation Chinese immigrant and heritage speaker who decided to brute-force his way to 99% character coverage rather than follow the conventional "learn to read by reading" advice. The extension pulls in character graph data from the Unicode Consortium, processes calligraphy videos through an LLM pipeline, and parallelizes API calls so everything loads at once. He matched border radii and font weights until the injected panels looked native to the host site. "I didn't read a single one" of the thousands of lines of code Claude generated, he writes on his blog.
Wu isn't a developer. That's the point. He described what he wanted and got working software. The extension is fragile and platform-specific. He doesn't care. It works, and building it took almost no effort. This is the agentic coding pitch made real.
But injecting custom JavaScript into a SaaS platform's DOM to modify its interface violates most terms of service. Hack Chinese founder Daniel N has been tolerant of Wu's experiments, but as agentic coding makes it trivial for anyone to remix proprietary software, expect platforms to fight back with technical countermeasures. Wu is force-feeding himself characters at a pace that would make a foie gras farmer wince, and he has the AI agent to thank for it.