Morfternight - Morfternight #77: Hands-on with GPT-4
Hello! I am Paolo Belcastro. You are reading this because you subscribed to Morfternight, the weekly newsletter about leadership, product management, distributed teams, and anything that tickles our brains. 👇 tl;drToday I am trying something special. Before diving in, I want to ask you a favor: if writing code assisted by an AI is not your cup of tea, that’s fine and understandable, but don’t unsubscribe just yet, this will be the only time it will happen in Morfternight, and from next week we’ll be back to our usual format. I’d like you to tell me in the comments, chat, or reply to this email. Conversely, if you love the idea of GPT-4 hands-on sessions, let me know too. They won’t live in Morfternight, but I’ll send these separately if enough readers are interested. 🤩 Welcome to the eight new Morfternighters who joined us last week. 📷 Photo of the weekSan Cataldo, Palermo - More Photos👋 Good Morfternight!As I got access to GPT-4, the new iteration of the OpenAI tool, and read that it will accept images as input, I decided I wanted to try and write a plugin for the blog that would leverage the new ability. I publish photos regularly, but I never take the time to write proper descriptions of them for screen readers. I feel guilty because it makes my site less accessible to people with sight impairments, so I thought I might fix that by asking GPT-4 to describe my images. Now, I haven’t written any code in years, so to speed the process up, I also decided to use GPT-4 to do that part. It took a few hours, but it worked pretty smoothly in the end. Important note: along the way, I learned that while GPT-4 will accept images soon, it doesn’t just yet. So the resulting plugin is still useless, but we’ll finalize it as soon as OpenAI adds the option to send images as input. I’ll share a few tips I learned along the way and the full transcript of the ChatGPT session and the resulting code, but before we dive into that, I also asked ChatGPT to summarize what we did in its own words. Here’s what ChatGPT has to say (unedited):
🗺️ A few tips I learned along the wayDon’t try to go straight to the final version. Instead, start simple and build on the initial output in a few iterations. This will make it easier to explain, debug, and understand. Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, ChatGPT stops responding in the middle of a message. When that happens, the magic prompt to continue without skipping a beat is:
ChatGPT tends to ask you to make changes to the code previously written instead of giving you the entire modified file each time. That would typically be ok, except that ChatGPT sometimes takes a different route, and the changes it suggests don’t entirely fit. So when that happens, just ask it to give you the complete file again, and it will. Similarly, there are times when after jumping a few times between files, I felt ChatGPT was losing track of where we were. In those cases, I just told ChatGPT I would provide the current state of the entire file and asked to modify that. It worked like a charm. At the very beginning, we encountered a bug. After I checked the console log for errors and provided the output to ChatGPT, it identified the problem and said the following:
That was fine, and the error was fixed, but it did it again a couple of times before remembering to avoid the problem. It’s a general feeling I had while working on this project: ChatGPT remembers the main points immediately but needs a few repetitions before remembering small details. 🤖 Full transcript and resultsYou can access the full transcript of the session here. Frankly, even if you are not into coding or writing WordPress plugins, it’s worth a read to see how smooth the process is. Consider that I did not write a single line of PHP, CSS, or Javascript. I only copied and pasted what ChatGPT shared with me. The final output comprises five files placed in a folder named Disclaimer: Use a test site, not a production one. I do not guarantee that this code won’t break your site. It works on mine, but a software engineer hasn’t reviewed it. So it’s a proof of concept only.
👨🏻💻 From the blog, last weekIt was a quiet week for the blog, so there is nothing to see here today ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That's it for today!I write and publish photos on paolo.blog If you know someone who could enjoy Morfternight, share it with them! 🤩 Cheers! |
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