Prototyping with GPT API is fun

I've built around 10 prototypes with GPT over the past couple weeks and it's surprisingly fun. Why is that?

Obviously it's a shiny new toy. Whenever I discover a new tech capability, I get excited. I recall discovering D3.js, Bokeh, Keras... These appeal to the Technology enthusiast in me.

But there's something specific to GPT: it is text-based. That gives several important things:

  1. You can get a minimal UI in seconds: import argparse plus a few lines of Python. Add rich for fancier command line output and you can make a quite polished product directly in the terminal. You'll have done several iterations before create-react-app finishes.
  2. Even before writing any code, you can try out ideas in ChatGPT or the GPT playground. Again, you can test ideas extremely fast.
  3. Even though Prompt engineering takes work to make things reliable, you can make a v0.1 of anything with almost any prompt that makes human sense. GPT is more finicky but with ChatGPT trained to be good at following instructions, you can input the task and Context in whatever format (that is common on the internet).