A developer spent a year doing the same 5-prompt sequence for every client brief. Research the company. Draft pitch angles. Pick one and expand it. Generate opening lines. Refine the best one. Same five prompts, every single brief, manually pasted and monitored one at a time. He estimated it was eating 20 minutes per brief, minimum, just sitting there watching ChatGPT respond before pasting the next prompt. Multiply that by 30 clients a month and you have 10 hours of copy-paste babysitting.
This week he shipped the fix.
It’s called AI Toolbox, a Chrome extension (also works on Edge, Brave, Opera, and Arc) that adds real prompt chaining to ChatGPT via a two-character trigger. No Custom GPTs. No API wrangling. Just sequential prompts that auto-fire the moment the previous response finishes.
What’s new
You build chains inside the extension: up to 10 prompts in sequence, with optional {{placeholder}} variables for the parts that change run to run. Give each chain a name. Save it.
Think of it like a recipe card for your ChatGPT workflows. A competitor research chain might have {{company_name}} as a variable in step 1 and {{target_market}} in step 3. You define those slots when you build the chain, not when you run it. The extension pulls every variable from every step and presents them in one form at start time. Fill the form, hit go, and the whole thing runs.
To run one: type .. in the ChatGPT compose box. A picker opens listing your saved chains with step counts next to each name. Select a chain. If it has placeholders, a form opens. Fill it. Submit. Prompt 1 fires automatically. ChatGPT responds. Prompt 2 fires. Repeat until the sequence completes.
A floating progress bar sits at the bottom of the page the whole time, showing which step you’re on and a stop button if you need to abort. So if ChatGPT goes sideways on step 4, you see it and can cut the chain instead of waiting for the full sequence to finish.
The twist
Here’s the design decision that makes this actually usable as an async tool: all {{placeholder}} variables across every step are collected upfront in a single form, before the chain starts running.
The developer tried collecting them per step first. Disaster. You’d kick off a chain, walk away, come back five minutes later, and find a modal waiting for input at step 2 instead of a finished sequence. The fix is obvious in hindsight but easy to get wrong: pull every variable from every prompt into one form at the start, fill it once, and let the chain run unattended.
That one call changes the whole value proposition. It’s not just automation. It’s fire-and-forget. Start a 5-step chain, switch tabs, come back to a completed sequence. No babysitting.
The practical implication is that you can stack multiple chains back to back. Start one for client A, let it run, start one for client B right after. You’re not managing two ChatGPT tabs. You’re filling two short forms and walking away. By the time you check back, both sequences are done.
How to run a chain
- 🔗 Install AI Toolbox from the Chrome Web Store
- 📝 Open the extension and build a chain: prompts in order,
{{variables}}where needed, give it a name - 🔁 Type
..in the ChatGPT compose box, pick your chain, fill the variable form, hit submit - Switch tabs. Do something else. Come back when it’s done.
First-time setup for a 5-step chain takes around 10 minutes. After that, each run is just filling a short form and switching to another tab.
Pro tips
Use drag-to-reorder when building a chain. Step order matters more than it seems, and rebuilding from scratch because you placed step 3 before step 2 is a small but real annoyance. The drag handles exist for exactly this.
Name your chains like search queries, not internal shorthand. “Client brief: research + pitch angles” tells you exactly what you’re picking when you’re scanning a list fast. “Chain 4” or “brief v2” tells you nothing when you’re in the middle of something else.
The .. picker shows your last 5 used chains as clickable pills at the top of the list. Most people actually run 3 or 4 chains regularly out of everything they’ve saved. Those regulars stay one click away every time. Once you have more than a dozen chains saved, those pills become the real interface.
Tools of the Day
✅ AI Toolbox Chrome Extension: prompt chaining for ChatGPT with .. trigger, upfront variable collection, drag-to-reorder steps, and floating progress tracking.
If you have any repeating multi-step workflow in ChatGPT right now, you can probably turn it into a saved chain. Worth the 10 minutes to set up.
Built a way to chain ChatGPT prompts and trigger them with .. in the compose box!! Auto-runs each step after the previous one finishes!!
by u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 in ChatGPTPromptGenius