ChatGPT Wrote my Code

TLDR:?There's a major disruption underway and your job may be at risk.

Large language models (LLM's like ChatGPT) roll out daily.?ChatGPT feels like it’s everywhere, having been the fastest growing app ever.?These large language models are causing quite the stir, and for good reason. Are they going to take your job? Are you going to finally be replaced by robots? Probably not, but it seems that if you can find creative ways to harness these new tools, you will prosper.

I’m as excited as the next engineer to try out a new tool.?

So when Chat-GPT rolled out late last year, I hopped right in.?I even dragged my kids into it, first writing a book about our backyard chickens, then a book about Pandas and their employment with my daughter, and finally writing a political satire book with a Python script I wrote.?None of this threatened anyone’s job.?

I was a complete noob.?But I wasn’t.

What really floored me was GitHub CoPilot.?For those not in the know, this is a plugin you can get for your code editor, and it writes pretty good snippets of code for you.?It’s powered by the same technology as ChatGPT, but instead of writing recipes or poems for you, it’s writing code.?It felt magical for someone who does some programming occasionally, forgets the syntax and forgets how certain libraries work.?

With CoPilot you can type in some documentation, which describes what you want a program to do, and it suggests a few snippets of code to accomplish it.?Here’s what the magic looks like:

On the left, you can see I wrote a simple thing to do in plain English: open a file, write some stuff to it.?On the right, GitHub’s Copilot wrote out 10 suggestions in less than a few seconds, of how to accomplish this.?This has been a game changer for me because my programming, like so many others, is to spend 75% of my time googling solutions and poking around on stack overflow.?I know what right looks like in Python, but I can’t always remember how to write it out from scratch.?At $10 per month, CoPilot feels like a steal.

Replace Me

But over the past three months my YouTube channel has become filled with garbage programmer influencers, promising that I can write an entire program in ChatGPT.?In fact they promsed I could start and run an entire million dollar business using ChatGPT. Rather than feed them, further clutter my algorithm, and make Google richer, I chose the DIY route.?

I decided to take a crack at creating a Chrome app, despite my limited experience in HTML and JavaScript. I'm no stranger to Python, but I wanted to see if ChatGPT could help me bridge the gap into new territory. And, spoiler alert: it did a pretty decent job.

My Problem

So what would I make my Chrome app do??I keep a long list of problems and long list of business ideas, but one kept on coming up:?I needed a way to deal with overwhelming ChatGPT.?I use ChatGPT 20 times per day. ?Sometimes, I get a little overzealous and write a long question, and then paste some copied code or even a whole document in to explain what I’m looking for.?I inevitably get that annoying “The message you submitted was too long.” And that’s annoying because then I’ve got to figure out how much is too much, and where to start cutting away text from my question.?

Why not a quick plugin that could do it for me??

This problem has been solved before, by better developers, but I’m distrustful that they’re pumping my questions back to Beijing or selling them to Google or Citibank. ?So what I really wanted was an app that counts words, doesn’t share what I’m writing, and is really easy to hop in and out of.?

I’m pretty sure I could find that in the Chrome store, but that’s not who I am, especially if I have some fancy new tools to play with.?

A Strong Start

I started by pretty much pouring my heart out to ChatGPT, explaining the above and what I wanted, without the editorializing.?I wrote:

?That was a great start, ChatGPT gave me the start of my app, and told me how I could paste it into VS Code, and how I could install it in Chrome and see it.?I iteratively pasted code (I don’t know JavaScript, and I haven’t written any HTML since 1998) into ChatGPT and asked it to modify this or that, change the function, until I saw what I wanted.?

I could paste entire chunks of code, and copy paste the error I was seeing, and it gave pretty good advice on how to proceed:

Instead of writing out a detailed question about the bug, I just lazily typed in “What’s this?”?Rather than give me some sarcastic junior developer response, it diligently gave me options and explained what was wrong.?

A mind-blowing 15 minutes later, and I had something that worked well.

And voila, it’s working!

You will recall, my original ask was:

And it looks like we got close.?I couldn’t help adding in a few extra bells and whistles like removing white-space and clipping the text back automatically.?We got there!

Pushed to Github, you can inspect the code here.

Carry Me Into the App Store

Keeping up the momentum, I thought it would be an easy win to get it up into the Chrome store and share it with the world.?I had no idea how to do this, and Google’s documentation is pretty dense.?The shortest video tutorial I could find that looked credible was 30 minutes long.?I’m not reading that and I’m not watching that!?

So back to ChatGPT we go:

A ten point plan for getting into the app store. Easy. That worked amazingly well.

Until it didn’t.?After about 20 minutes of working on putting my app in the store, I hit a snag:?ChatGPT was slightly behind on documentation.?Google was throwing an error caused by new requirements introduced in 2022, after ChatGPT last saw the internet and had some training.?Had we reached the end of the road??Was I going to have to break down and Google my problem??Or worse, <gasp> read the docs?

Phind:?Specialized ChatGPT

The most amazing tool for coding, Phind.?Phind takes ChatGPT and combines the technology with the internet.?Not the whole internet, just the parts where programmers hang out.?

Phind is a search engine designed for developers and technical questions. It provides answers with detailed explanations and relevant code snippets from the internet. Phind is optimized for technical queries and focuses on providing concise and accurate information.

Phind can investigate the latest documentation, like the latest requirements for Chrome apps.?In fact, I typed in my error, and pasted the associated file in as well, and Phind immediately gave me an answer back, a detailed explanation, and a possible code fix.?

I was stunned:?I don't have to remember syntax or clever ways to use code anymore, I just had to be a noob product manager; instead of hounding software engineers with questions, I was copying and pasting my code, errors, and having a conversation about the errors with robots.

Publish

My app is now published, and you can find it here.?

?What did we learn from this??

Going from 0 to 1 is easier than ever with these tools.?I didn’t know how to make a plugin, I didn’t really know the languages underpinning the plugin, and I had no idea what the process was to submit for a Chrome plugin when I began.?I knew coding well, and ChatGPT made the transition process really fast and easy.?The LLM’s got me to the 80/20 mark in under an hour, a remarkable feat.

As excited as I am about my app, it’s very rough.?Making a polished, competitive app still takes skill, experience, and work.?That last 20% is the hardest, and that requires a lot more work, and probably a more skilled engineer. ?

Human In the Loop

Which brings us full circle. Will robots replace your job??

The answer, dear reader white collar reader, is probably not (unless you’re a doctor or a lawyer, and then . . . prepare to have your wages depressed).?ChatGPT couldn’t solve all the problems I ran into, Phind did a lot better.?But the software still couldn’t write itself.?That wasn’t my ask, my ask was to just help me make the app.?But it came close to doing the whole thing when I asked the right questions.

So what does this mean for you, dear white collar reader? ?Brace for impact:

1. Learn the Tools:?Depending on your profession and how much creativity is involved, LLM’s could end up 10x’ing your productivity.?Learn them and you future-proof your job.?
2. Keep a Human In The Loop:?The technology is far from perfect and not ready for autopilot (though the folks making AutoGPT are trying).?The real superpower emerges when you use it to speed your writing, or brainstorm ideas, or review big documents.?This all still funnels back to a human.?
3. Empower Your People:?If you are a manager, make sure your humans are using these tools now.?There have been a ton of articles and videos about how to use ChatGPT as a coding tool, a creative thought partner, a therapist, and a copywriter.?Empower your people to learn, test, and use these tools before your competition does.

This new tech is going to disrupt a lot of jobs.?Whether you’re writing code, copyright, law or practicing medicine, you’ll either learn to use the new tools or fall behind.?