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by tinyprojects 1173 days ago
100% this.

I just used GPT-4 to help build an analytics dashboard using ChartJS. There's so many settings in ChartJS, it would have taken me a week to StackOverflow / Google how to get my charts how I'd like them - it took me a day with GPT-4. I could just ask it anything and it would help no problem. Any buggy code it produced, I'd just copy and paste the error message and it would provide a fix.

The day before I built a basic version of Stripe Radar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35323278

Coding with AI has made me more excited to build than ever before after 10+years of programming.

3 comments

What interface are you using? I've so far only used ChatGPT through the web interface. (I pay for plus). I just ask it for things that are standalone snippet-like things. Perfect functions on the standard library, or an emacs lisp snippet for converting a unix epoch to an ISO timestamp. I'm not sure I could allow it to read my company's code, but is that what you're doing when you're using as part of a large project like that?
Imo the chartjs docs are not very good. Or i'm just used to rust's docs.rs, where the whole api surface is documented. I couldn't find something like this for chartjs.
You mean like this?

https://www.chartjs.org/docs/latest/api/

I just started looking at the docs a couple minutes ago to understand why the OP claims that it would have taken a week to accomplish something with this library. I don't get it.

How is it possible that any task could take a week or more with this library? It looks extremely straightforward and the documentation contains lots of examples.
Not sure what your background is, but in my experience, some tinkering takes ages. Some tasks you deem to be a lot of work are relatively fast in the end. And some tasks produce errors that send you on a journey for hours. Straight forward looks and good docs may not help here.