PullMD Part 1: Ctrl+A and the Junk Context – Simply Explained
We’ve all done it. You read a long discussion online, want the chatbot to help you make sense of it, so you hit Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C — “select all” and “copy” — and paste the whole thing into the chat.
Then the answer comes back — fine, usually. But you just handed the model a huge pile of junk to dig through first. And you do this select-copy-paste routine again and again, especially on your phone.
Why That Happens
When you paste a webpage, you’re not just pasting the content. You’re pasting everything — the navigation bar at the top, the cookie banner, the ads in the sidebar, the footer with twenty links nobody clicks.
Roughly a third of what you paste is the actual article. The rest is noise.
And the model has to read all of it. Every menu item, every “Accept cookies” button, every “You might also like” widget — it all has to fit into the model’s attention before it gets to the part you actually care about.
Think of the model’s memory like a desk with limited surface area. The more junk you put on it, the less room there’s left for what matters — and every one of those flyers costs time and computing power, for nothing.
The Brief Hope
A while back, Cloudflare — a big internet infrastructure company — launched a small service that promised exactly what I wanted. You give it a web address, and it gives you back clean text, no navigation, no ads.
I tried it. A few encyclopedia pages, a tech blog. It looked great.
Then the disappointment. The service only works if the website’s owner has actively turned it on. Most of the sites I read every day — including Reddit — hadn’t.
For the rest I either got an error, or the same messy soup as before. Just one extra step.
A tool that works for a tenth of what you need isn’t a solution. It’s a bandage.
Building My Own — But Small
So the decision: if nothing ready-made works, I’ll build it myself. Not everything at once. Just Reddit first, since that’s where I read most discussions.
There’s a known trick with Reddit: add .json to the end of any link and you get back a clean, structured version of the post, without needing to sign up for anything. It’s been quietly working for years.
That felt like the right first step. Start with one source, get it really good, then think about the rest.
A Quick Detour: What’s a PWA?
A PWA — short for “Progressive Web App” — is a webpage that can be “installed” on your phone, almost like a real app. It shows up on your home screen, has its own icon, and can do a few things normal websites can’t.
One of those things is the “share sheet” on Android — the menu that pops up when you tap “Share” in any app. A PWA can register itself there, so when you’re reading something in the Reddit app and tap Share, my little tool appears in the list, next to WhatsApp and Signal.
That was the goal: tap Share, my tool catches the link, and a few seconds later I have clean text ready to drop into a chat. No copy-paste, no detour.
The Planning Conversation
Before writing a single line of code, I wanted to think it through with Claude. So I opened a chat — not to write code, just to figure out the shape of the thing.
My very first prompt had a typo. Autocorrect changed “Reddit” into a different word, but Claude figured out what I meant anyway. Which was a little funny, given that the whole point of the project was to give the model better starting material.
The chat sorted out the big architecture question: should there be one way in or two? We landed on two. A plain technical interface for me and my scripts, and a small webpage on top of it for sharing from my phone. Both connecting to the same engine underneath.
We also agreed on small but important details — like how to format threaded comments so they stay readable even when replies go five levels deep. Instead of the usual quote-marker chains (>, > >, > > >), we’d just indent with spaces. Cleaner, easier on the eyes.
And then there was the codename. Claude suggested a short, catchy one, and I used it for the next few weeks before having to drop it for legal reasons. More on that in Part 4.
The Result of That Evening
By the end of the chat, I had a full plan written out: how the pieces fit together, what each one does, what the share-sheet entry should look like.
Not a single line of code. That was on purpose. The chat was for thinking, not for typing. The typing would come later, with a different tool — Claude Code — taking the plan as its starting brief.
That same evening, at 21:53, the building began.
Part 1 of 9 in the PullMD series.