I’ve been reading a lot of LLM papers lately. Attention mechanisms, RLHF pipelines, mixture of experts, quantization techniques. The kind of stuff where one paragraph assumes you already know three other things, and each of those things has its own rabbit hole.
I kept hitting the same wall. I’d be halfway through a paper, run into a concept I didn’t fully get, and jump to a search engine. Open a few tabs. Read a blog post. Watch half a YouTube video. By the time I came back to the paper, I’d lost the thread. The context switch was killing my reading flow.
So I built ExplainToMe.
What it does
You paste a URL. The app loads the page in a viewer. You highlight any text you don’t understand, and an LLM explains it to you right there, in a side panel, while you keep the original content visible.
No tab switching. No copy-pasting into ChatGPT. No losing your place.
The key feature is explanation levels. You pick one of four:
- ELI5: analogies and simple words, like you’re explaining it to a curious kid
- Simple: plain language, no jargon, just the core idea
- Detailed: proper terminology, nuances, the full picture
- Expert: assumes you know the domain, gets into edge cases and caveats
This matters more than it sounds. Sometimes I know the general area but need a quick refresher. Simple is enough. Other times I’m staring at a transformer architecture diagram and I need the expert-level breakdown with all the math context. One size doesn’t fit all, and being able to choose the depth on the fly makes the whole thing actually useful.
The follow-up conversation
After the initial explanation, you can ask follow-up questions. The app keeps the full conversation history, so the LLM knows what it already told you. It’s like having a study buddy sitting next to you who read the same paper and has infinite patience.
This is the part that surprised me the most. The follow-ups are where the real learning happens. The first explanation gives you the shape of the idea. The follow-ups let you poke at the edges until it clicks.
Why not just use ChatGPT or Claude directly?
You could. I did, for months. But the workflow of selecting text, copying it, switching to a chat window, pasting it with “explain this,” reading the answer, then switching back to the paper… it adds up. It’s not about any single step being hard. It’s about the friction accumulating until you stop doing it.
ExplainToMe removes the friction. The content and the explanation live side by side. Your eyes stay in one place. Your reading flow stays intact.
On top of that, ExplainToMe gives extra context to the LLM about what you are reading, so the explanations are tailored and concise.
Try it
The app is live at explaintome.website. Paste a URL, pick your level, highlight something. That’s it.
