Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I'm Himanshu. I built Cognitive Mode because I realized I was actively losing my engineering muscle memory. Instead of reading docs or deep debugging, I was instantly pasting every minor issue into an LLM. Cognitive Mode is a 100% local-first Chrome extension that introduces intentional friction into your AI workflows. When you try to prompt an AI (like ChatGPT, Claude, or Bolt.new), it throws up a "Hypothesis Gate" and a custom countdown timer. It forces you to articulate what you think the problem is, and what you've already tried, before the AI does the thinking for you. The Irony: I actually built this entire project using AI "vibe coding" in a rapid sprint. I used the tool to build the guardrails against the tool! Core Features: ⏳ Intentional Speedbumps to break the copy-paste loop. 🧠 The Hypothesis Gate to force articulation. 🔒 100% Client-Side Privacy (Zero databases, purely local storage). It's completely free and open-source. I'd love for you to try it out, check out the code, or just tell me how much you hate friction! Let me know what you think.

Cognitive Mode

Stop mindless prompting. Rebuild your problem-solving brain.

Stop mindless prompting. Rebuild your problem-solving brain.