Atharv Ketkar

Map of your page

Console on your browser is very crazy

I just keep finding ways in which it can keep helping you

AI can read your HTML/CSS, but it has no idea what the browser did with it

I just realized if you write some JavaScript code whatever website you have loaded you can get the dimensions the position the styling and each and every single data point about the thing that is loaded on your screen

You get a detailed log of what is actually rendering and you can then use that to debug

Basically you can now provide context to AI that what is happening post render without just taking a flimsy screenshot which AI cannot read well

Screenshots are lossy compression of 3D spatial data into 2D pixels.

Run the script see which things are misplaced which things are overlapping which things are appearing not appearing which things are hidden

Give that whole context to AI and it will fix it

One of the best life hacks lol

I think the biggest pain with AI is how dogshit it is handling UI and visual stuff

But hey that poor thing just doesn’t has any context and also not much know about what’s happening post render

Give it the post render context and you will be Gucci

The console gives you structured data about the render tree

It’s gives AI X-ray vision

Exact pixel coordinates

Computed styles (not what you wrote, what the browser calculated)

Bounding boxes for collision detection

Viewport relationships

Parent-child hierarchies with actual layout impact

And lack of these above is why screenshots are terrible

It has no semantic information, can’t measure distances or dimensions accurately , can’t tell what’s clickable, what’s hidden with visibility: hidden vs display: none, can’t see z-index layering, can’t detect elements that are technically rendered but off-screen

Imagine a browser extension that:

  1. Has source mapping
  2. Captures render state automatically
  3. Compares it to previous states (detect regressions)
  4. Generates a “render diff” when something breaks
  5. Formats it perfectly for AI consumption
  6. Maybe even has context of your UI files so that it can also tell that what was supposed to happen but what ended up happening

AI doesn’t need eyes, it needs measurements.

The console gives you those measurements in a format AI can actually reason about.

The console is, in a sense, a living API for the rendered DOM

Modern CSS is Contextually Dependent

The final layout depends on so many runtime variables that you can’t predict it from source code alone

That is because rendering is a runtime process with many variables that can only be known after the browser actually runs the code.

With this you can extract that’s impossible to know otherwise

  • The Cascade Winner
  • Layout Constraint Violations
  • The Interaction State Layer

Claude reaction:

The core insight is AI is blind to the rendering layer. It knows HTML/CSS rules, but has no idea what the browser actually did with those rules. And that gap is where 90% of UI bugs live.

The browser does hundreds of calculations between your CSS and the final pixels:

  • Cascade resolution (which rule wins?)
  • Layout algorithms (flexbox, grid, flow)
  • Stacking contexts (z-index + positioning)
  • Constraint satisfaction (min/max width interactions)
  • Inheritance chains

The Invisible Problems

  • An element is technically rendered but pushed 10,000px to the right by some rogue padding
  • Two elements both have position: absolute and are stacked perfectly on top of each other
  • Something has opacity: 0.01 so it’s “visible” but you can’t see it
  • A parent has overflow: hidden and is clipping its children
  • Z-index stacking context issues where element A should be above B but isn’t
  • Flexbox did something weird because of min-width: auto on a child
  • An element is 0.5px tall because of a collapsing margin

Screenshots show you the symptom. The console shows you the crime scene.

What This Unlocks

Right now when you ask AI “why is my button not visible?”, it guesses based on your code. It says “maybe check z-index” or “try adding display: block”.

But if you paste: “Button has getBoundingClientRect() returning {x: -9999, y: 0, width: 0, height: 0} and computed style shows position: absolute, left: -9999px“

Now AI knows. It’s not visible because it’s off-screen. Not a z-index issue, not an opacity issue. It’s literally positioned off the canvas.

The Browser Extension Idea

This is where it gets crazy. Imagine it watches your DOM and automatically logs:

  • Every layout shift
  • When elements collide
  • When something renders outside viewport
  • When computed styles don’t match authored styles (specificity issues)
  • When JavaScript modifies something that causes a reflow

Then when you ask “why did my layout break?”, it can say: “At 14:23:17, adding class .active caused element X to grow from 200px to 2000px, pushing everything else off screen. Here’s the cascade that caused it.”

It’s like having browser DevTools that can explain itself to AI.

Here’s what it should capture:

  1. Layout Shift Detection: MutationObserver + ResizeObserver
  2. Cascade Analysis: Compare el.style vs getComputedStyle(el) to see what won
  3. Reflow Tracking: Monkey-patch DOM methods that trigger reflows
  4. Stacking Context Visualization: Map out z-index hierarchy
  5. Dead Code Detection: Styles that exist but don’t affect render

The killer feature: Temporal diffs. Not just “here’s the current state” but “here’s what changed between render N and render N+1.”