DiscourseCopilot - a fully private Chrome extension that lets you chat with AI on the whole thread

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Hey everyone!

Just want to share a chrome extension I built for any Discourse forum

I am a heavy user of discourse forums, and sometimes it’s quite hard to catch up on long discourse topics. I often end up scrolling through hundreds of replies. So I built a Chrome extension for myself, and figured people here might find it useful too.

It sits in Chrome’s side panel while you browse a forum.

  • One click summarizes the topic you’re on. It reads the whole thread, not just a couple of search hits (you can cap how much it reads on giant topics).
  • Then you can chat with it about the thread: “which reply mentioned a workaround for X?” It has the full topic as context, so it can answer and point you to the post it came from.
  • Agent Mode: you ask a question and it goes off and searches the forum for you, reading topics step by step, then answers with numbered sources you can click. I recently rewrote this part as a ReAct loop - it plans what keyword to search first and iterate based off the search result.
  • Summaries and chats are saved per topic in your browser. When new replies show up it only fetches those, so it doesn’t keep pulling the whole thread from the forum.

Since it runs in your browser with your own forum login, it also read login-only topics that your account has access to. So unlike agent operating in the public internet, this extension can query parts of the forum that requires login or exclusive access.

On the privacy side: it’s fully open source, no accounts, no analytics. API keys and chat history are stored locally; with a cloud provider, the topic content used for answers is sent to that provider. You can also use a local model (Ollama / LM Studio) for inference instead of a cloud AI provider. If you don’t have a key, a free Gemini key from Google AI Studio is enough to get started: https://aistudio.google.com/api-keys. I use the free tier myself, and when I hit the rate limit I just switch providers in the toggle.

Open a topic, click the extension icon, allow access (it asks once per forum), paste your key, hit Create summary. That’s it.

The chrome web store now shows ~400 users, which is pretty cool for a small side project. I would love to hear how it works on other Discourse communities too, so I thought I’d share it here. And feedback and bug reports very welcome! Thanks!

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