Honest Thumbnails: Chrome extension swaps YouTube clickbait covers for real video frames
jdjohnson · x · 2026-11-03
Developer pondorasti released Honest Thumbnails, an open-source (MIT) Chrome extension that replaces YouTube's clickbait thumbnails with real stills from the video — you can pick frames from the early, middle, or late parts.
The trick builds on Karpathy's weekend project HackerTube: YouTube's CDN serves still frames at the ¼, ½, and ¾ marks of every video, so the extension just grabs those. The author says Claude wrote the code — making the icon took longer.
Context: Karpathy previously had Claude filter 43M HN comments over 20 years down to 6,454 repeatedly recommended videos to build HackerTube, a login-free curated viewing experience.
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