This week I started a new side project with Chat GPT. Mainly looking to get some first hand experience with the technology, and get more exercise bootstrapping a product.
I set out to build an app that would take in a list of youtube videos, and output a single bullet list summary of the content.
On top of building an app that wraps Chat GPT, I also used it to help create the app. Overall I was very impressed:
- It was able to quickly give me some boilerplate code that I could then iterate on myself. Such as this React Form with buttons to add additional lines of input.
- It was also able to add types to a Javascript file I was converting to Typescript, without needing any hints on the types.
- Perhaps even more impressive: as I was working with it to summarize articles (using my article on designing good commands) I asked it “What can someone learn from this article about coding in general, outside of the specific examples discussed?” And it delivered!
As much as I love Haxe, I realized it probably was not a good fit for this project, so also needed to brush up on Next.js.
I lost at least an hour to this issue: I was building an endpoint which would take in a Url, then load the html into a virtual dom to extract all the text. I kept getting “You Need to Enable Javascript to Run This App”, which I assumed was coming from Next.js either loading the html or running the virtual dom. I finally realized the site I was practicing with actually had the text “You Need to Enable Javascript to Run This App” hidden up top.
Unfortunately today Chat GPT has been very flaky. There have been times where it’s been down entirely. Which made it difficult to troubleshoot issues I was having with the API. Eventually discovered I was addressing the wrong model (“davinci-codex“, instead of “text-davinci-003”). Interestingly it was Chat GPT which suggested davinci-codex in the first place. Come on text-davinci-003, believe it yourself!!
At the end of the week I’ve got a single page where you can put in a url. The app will scrape all the text from the page, then pass twice to Chat GPT to eventually get a bullet summary. Still a lot of work to make it more useful, but it’s a great start. \m/
