Two things pushed me into building this. First was just normal dev work: I'd be in the middle of something and need to hand a piece of the page to an AI tool, and the only way to get it was popping open devtools, inspecting the element, right-clicking, copy, outerHTML, paste. Every single time. I wanted to just hover over the thing and grab it, or grab a whole page at once and have it sitting in a folder ready for whenever I actually needed it, instead of going back into the debugger and re-collecting it on demand.
Second thing was targeted captures specifically. I'd been using a screenshot-and-hand-to-AI workflow for that, which is fast but the model misreads text often enough that I stopped trusting it for anything that mattered. Copy-pasting the real text is accurate but it's slow and it's annoying to do it ten times in a session. I wanted highlight, click, done, with the actual text and not a guess at it.
So I built Aura Extract. Hover over any element and it captures just that node's clean HTML with no side effects on the page itself, nothing added, nothing left behind once you're done.
Every capture does both automatically, copies to your clipboard and writes a file, so it's there either way you want it. In practice, if it's something small I'm almost always just pasting straight from the clipboard into a chat. If it's something big, like a whole page, I'll point the AI at the file itself instead of pasting it in, mostly because dumping a massive block of text into a chat window risks blowing right past the context limit before the model even gets to the part I actually care about.
Markdown is the default since that covers most of what I actually need, but you can grab stripped-down HTML or the full raw HTML too, if you're after the actual page structure for something like figuring out how a layout's built rather than just reading the content. Markdown's the default because raw HTML through a naive converter drags along scripts, styles, and layout cruft that eats tokens for nothing, so Extract runs everything through three stages before it writes anything: strip the junk, run Mozilla's Readability to isolate the actual article content, then convert what's left to Markdown. Typically cuts 20 to 40 percent off the token count versus dumping raw HTML, and what's left is something simple enough a model can actually use instead of picking through div soup.
There's also a crawl mode for full docs sites, click a sidebar or table of contents and it follows every link, fetches each page, and writes the whole thing to a local folder with an index that has all the internal links rewritten to point at your local copies. Handy for dropping a whole SDK's docs into Cursor or an AI IDE in one shot instead of forty separate copy-pastes.
Happy to answer questions in the comments.
