I Hired GPT-4 to Develop a Browser Extension for Me, and It Generated 95% of the Code!

Screenshot of Chat Shelf interface

I embarked on a project development journey with the assistance of GPT-4 (ChatGPT Plus) and named it ChatShelf. The project encompasses:

• a browser extension,
• a landing page
• and a function computation project.

Here’s a breakdown of the code statistics for the most extensive part of the project:

Added lines: 20,155 | Removed lines: 8,876 | Total lines: 11,279s

The Code Was Almost Entirely Written by GPT-4:

• The development language was TypeScript, which I hadn’t genuinely mastered.
• I used TailwindCSS for styling. It was my first time using it, but I’ve now memorized many styles and seldom need GPT’s assistance.
• I developed a browser extension, something I hadn’t touched in over a decade.

Surprisingly, in just a month, GPT-4 helped me generate over 95% of the code.

Here Are Some of My Observations:

1. For now, even GPT-4 can’t replace experienced programmers.
2. Advanced Data Analysis seems to have a slightly stronger code capability than GPT-4.
3. If you’re unfamiliar with the syntax of a language, debugging can take longer than writing the code itself.
4. Including more context in the prompt leads to more accurate code generation.
5. It’s best to rely on stable, long-standing packages.
6. Chain-of-thought (cot) reasoning proves effective during the coding process.

I’ll need some time to organize the specifics of my approach, but I’ll be detailing the entire process in a future post.