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Built a ChatGPT Chrome extension in a week with no coding experience
1 points by designaas 1178 days ago
I was curious to see if GPT-4 hype is real so I tried an experiment with it… I’m a designer and have never coded in my life. So I tried to build a fully functional chrome extension with ChatGPT functionality that also allows you to save your prompts. Here’s what happened

Day 1 - Non-believer I spent the evening figuring out what type of extension I could potentially build and settled on one that integrates ChatGPT prompting with the added functionality to save prompts.

Day 2 - Entering the Matrix After years of hearing about people spinning up servers, I finally did it myself with guidance from ChatGPT. Using the terminal, I could get it up and running much easier than I thought it would be, in preparation for the extension.

Day 3 - Building Rome in a Day With about 30 prompts, I was able to get something mildly functional with little stress. It was mind-blowing to see that it was giving me functional code, and I'd integrated OpenAI's API to get responses.

Day 4 - Training dAI Although it was easy to get something working, I quickly realized that asking the same prompt multiple times could result in different results. This made minor issues mammoth, and arguing became essential.

Day 5 & 6 - Icarus The extension works! It was an unbelievable feeling to go from 0-100 so quickly. I wanted to show the world! I prompted for help setting up a server on Heroku and ended up breaking everything. After hours of failing, I moved back to my lane locally.

Day 7 - ChatEXT The extension is complete! It can search using GPT from any website, save prompts and outputs, copy prompts to clipboard, search saved responses, save your history locally, and delete saved responses on demand.

Building this extension was a fantastic learning experience. It was exciting to see the progress I made each day, and it was gratifying to know that I could build something that I never thought was possible. With tools like ChatGPT and a willingness to learn, anything is possible, even for non-coders like me. Now I'm going to sleep

To see a demo of the extension you can find it here: https://twitter.com/efesopoulos/status/1640382875173285889