As a JavaScript learning exercise (OK mostly because it was fun), I started writing a simple bot to play the Paperclips game[1] for me.

I was really surprised with how easy it was to do stuff like add in a third party graphing library and then write a bit of code to graph interesting metrics on this page, directly from the console of my own browser.

I've also used greasemonkey for years to inject interesting scripts to improve usability on a couple of key sites. I think there are tons of options to do this kinda stuff, but I'm sure the tooling could be improved a little bit in some areas (e.g., to easily take advantage of npm packages).

1. https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html 2. https://github.com/trogau/paperclips/

> Are you aware of the console? I have used it for all kinds of stuff.

Sorry that (having posted the link) I don't have anything that concretely adds to the discussion, but I just thought I should point out that I'm not the author of the blog-article, as a few posters here seem to think.

I definitely don't endorse the author's views either, but I thought it was an interesting post for discussion, and I certainly don't think that making some aspects of coding more accessible is a bad thing.

edit: I just noticed the actual author is posting to the thread.