Maintained 'de-AI' layer for Gmail and Google Workspace that actually kills the recurring Gemini upsell nags, not just the buttons
A June 2 HN front-page post titled 'Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left' drew 600+ comments from people fed up with Gmail's AI feature promotions and Gemini nags they cannot permanently dismiss, with many migrating to Fastmail rather than keep fighting the UI. The existing free extensions hide the persistent Gemini buttons via CSS but openly skip the recurring 'try Gemini for X' popups and break whenever Google reshuffles the DOM. The opportunity is a polished, fast-updating off-switch for the whole Google Workspace surface (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Search) that suppresses the recurring promos and upsell interstitials, not just the static buttons, and that someone non-technical can install once and forget.
The moat is maintenance cadence, not the initial CSS. Anyone can hide a button once. The win is treating it like an ad-filter list with a public update feed so it survives Google's UI churn, plus catching the recurring promo dialogs the current extensions admit they ignore. Ship the boring update pipeline, not a one-off hack that dies in three weeks.
landscape (3 existing solutions)
The category exists but is stuck at cosmetic button-hiding that misses the actual irritant (the recurring promos) and breaks on Google's frequent UI churn. The unmet need is a maintained product that treats Google's UI changes as an adversary and ships filter updates fast, the way ad-block lists do.