skimlens

See whether an article is worth your time before you read it.

skimlens tells you whether an article deserves your time — before you spend it. Open any article, press Alt+S, and skimlens extracts the body text, has the AI model of your choice read it, and gives you a score out of 100 with a verdict: read closely, skim, or skip. The score is not "is this a good article". It is "is this worth it for YOU" — skimlens weighs the article against the stack you work in, the areas you follow, and the project you are building right now, all of which you enter in Settings. WHAT YOU GET • Read-or-skip score — 0-100, with a one-line reason grounded in your profile • Summary — the article's conclusion in three sentences or fewer • Key points — 5 to 10 technical points, each one clickable • Jump to the source — click any point and the page scrolls to the exact paragraph it came from, and highlights it • Outline — the article's structure at a glance • Diagram — the model draws the core architecture or flow as a diagram you can open full size and export as SVG or PNG • Still current? — with web search on, the model checks whether the piece has been superseded • Excerpts — select text on the page, click "Save to skimlens", and the model condenses it into a note • Export to Obsidian — the summary and your excerpts become a Markdown note with frontmatter, written straight into your vault BRING YOUR OWN MODEL skimlens has no servers and no subscription. You supply an API key from a model provider you already use, and the extension talks to that endpoint directly. Several major providers are preconfigured, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint can be entered by hand, and free-tier models are easy to pick out of the list. Point it at a model running locally on your own machine and no article text leaves the computer at all. The full list of providers is in Settings, where you can also type the name of any model your key has access to. The summary comes back in the language the article was written in — an English article gives you English notes, a Chinese article gives you Chinese ones. PRIVACY There is no skimlens backend, no account and no analytics. The page text goes to the model endpoint you configured and nowhere else. Your API key is stored in local storage only — never in Chrome's sync storage, so it is never uploaded to your Google account. Full policy: https://gist.github.com/luckyfriends/bf27d50b0bca6d587ccd3381fb24fc76