I audited 2 months of my ChatGPT history. The results made me build something.

An MIT paper on LLM use recently caught my attention researchers found that regular use for simple tasks can measurably reduce cognitive engagement over time. There's a good discussion of it here:

So I went back through my own ChatGPT history out of curiosity.

A lot of "rewrite this sentence," "what's the word for X," "give me a synonym for Y." Things I already knew or would've figured out in a minute or two. I wasn't using AI as a tool. I was using it as a reflex.

Same with feeds opening Twitter with no intent, scrolling, closing, opening again with no memory of what I was looking for. My thumb was running the show.

Nothing in my existing toolkit addressed this. Screen time apps tell you how much you used something. They don't ask if you tried first.

So I built pause.do a Chrome extension that adds a small pause before AI prompts, long scroll sessions, and tab overload. Not a blocker. Just a moment: "Want to try this yourself first?"

Everything runs locally. No data leaves your device. No account required.

It's free to install. Genuinely curious whether this resonates with anyone else or if I'm just projecting my own habits onto the world.