Transcript: Is Prompting the Future of Coding?

The transcript of How Do You Use ChatGPT? with Nick Dobos is below for paying subscribers.

Timestamps

Introduction: 00:00:31
How Nick built Grimoire, the top-ranked GPT for programming: 00:05:20
Ship a website with two words and a single click: 00:10:25
How Grimoire is solving the “blank canvas problem” in AI creation: 00:14:57
The coding curriculum that can take you from zero to full programmer: 00:16:30
Why Grimoire has an edge over ordinary ChatGPT: 00:23:29
Nick’s thoughts on building the system prompt for a GPT: 00:34:10
The utility of AI as a new layer on top of existing apps: 00:40:04
How Nick uses a custom GPT to unpack his emotions: 00:43:11
How to use AI to break down tasks—from programming to daily to-do lists: 00:50:35

Transcript

Dan Shipper (00:00:32)

Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Dobos (00:00:34)

Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Dan Shipper (00:00:36)

Thanks. Awesome to have you because we've been Twitter mutuals for a really long time and you're just constantly dropping cool stuff on Twitter and you have this sort of mysterious mystique to you that I quite appreciate. And it's fun to actually put a face to the mystique.

Nick Dobos (00:00:56)

Oh, well, thank you. I have fun. I don't know. I just play around with it. I started working at Twitter and then I got into posting on it and now I'm addicted. So having fun with it and people seem to enjoy all these random experiments I've been sharing and having fun with. Sono, it's cool to meet you and hang out with you. I’ve been a fan of your writing for a long time with Every and everything. And yeah, I've got a chance to work with our mutual friend Nathan, so excited to be here and meet you.

Dan Shipper (00:01:24)

Amazing. That's so awesome. So, for people who don't know, you are a programmer. You built the number one programming GPT, Grimoire, which is a coding assistant. It's like a wizard-based coding assistant. And you've done over 1 million chats, which is wild. So I think one of the foremost experts in the world on building custom GPTs and doing that successfully, and then also using ChatGPT for programming. And I think that's sort of where I want to start. Can you talk to me about your introduction to AI for programming? How did you get into it?

Nick Dobos (00:02:09)

Yeah, I mean, I guess I've been programming for a long time—11, almost 12 years now, professionally. And so I've done a few small AI projects throughout the years, mostly for games and little things like that. Nothing too crazy. I think, having done that, I realized that a lot of it is just very house of cards, smoke and mirrors. But with this newest wave, I had been working as a programmer, mainly doing iOS apps. And I saw GitHub Copilot and just, oh, that's a cool tool. Because as you're programming, you have a little bit of autocomplete and it works with just the things on your phone versus finishing the sentence or guessing what's going in.

But, I started playing around with GitHub Copilot and was really just surprised at how well it works. Because you can do all these little tricks with it where you can even write a comment about what you want it to do and then it'll finish big sections. So yeah, I started playing around with that. I think I had some lucky timing because I'd been working at Twitter and then the whole Elon [Musk] thing happened and that was a whole mess. So I got laid off from that and then just had some time to play around and learn new things. So ChatGPT came out in November that year, I think, and really just I started playing around with it, having some fun with it. And then especially when GPT-4 came out, I tried it that day and was like, hey, can I use this for programming? Because I had tried using GitHub and found a little bit of success with that. And it was really just blown away with how well it worked. I was immediately like, wow, if I had asked a student or someone who's learning computer science to do this I feel like it would be at a college-level or higher.

So, whoa, how can I use this to start filling in pieces of things I'm working on? So yeah, I started doing this app and really just haven't balanced it, playing around with it. I think one thing that maybe separates me out from a lot of people who are already working in this space is that I really had not been focused on the big AI pushes happening beforehand. So I'm almost a little bit clueless and catching up on that end, but maybe having a little bit more fun from a front-end and artistic perspective and having a lot of fun exploring with it. I did my coding wizard GPT and I'm , it's so silly. I picked the silliest branding ever for this thing. And I don't know, people just seem to like it and honestly just playing around with it, can I turn this into a tool that's useful and entertaining and a little bit fun.

Dan Shipper (00:04:38)

That's really cool. I love it. I mean, I do think that spirit of exploration is the thing I love about AI stuff. And I think it's just the thing that the people that are doing the best, most interesting work in the space right now, just have that sense, that curiosity. And you definitely, definitely have that. And that's why I love seeing your stuff.

Nick Dobos (00:05:07)

Yeah, it's just so much fun to play around with. So I honestly can't even help it.

Dan Shipper (00:05:10)

Totally. I’m wondering—maybe you can just show us Grimoire. I want to see it in action. I want you to show us how it works.

Nick Dobos (00:05:22)

I had started playing around with the custom instructions just as a way to shape the responses. And I realized you could format it in all these different ways and build a hotkey. So I started playing around with ideas there. And as I was learning to do this and learning, how do I ask questions to get code out of it, I was coming up with, oh, is there an easy way to do this? But I was also just trying to write articles explaining that. When the GPT Store came out, I was like, wait, can I just shove those articles into a chatbot and turn that into an interactive experience? So it almost turned out somewhere between an assistant and maybe a tutorial or a curriculum.

But honestly, I just started throwing out little shortcuts, little tips and tricks. And then as it's gotten a little bit more popular, partner with people doing different things. So, basically the idea is it's a coding wizard. And I guess part of my thought here is that I think that LLMs have really created this weird new branch of programming that I almost want to call it a branch of abstract programming. I guess I've been referring to it as like prompt programming. It feels like it's almost a new form of programming languages. We've had things like binary assembly language, low-level programming languages, we've gotten into high-level programming languages and depending on how loose-y you want to get with the definitions, even things like no-code or even just typing a document on a computer, is that programming? I don't know, maybe? You're giving commands to a computer to shape it, make it do something. So it seems like LLMs are just a way to do that. So there's a whole bunch of different projects you can do, a whole bunch of different hotkeys you can use, but one of the simple ones, which I just thought would be a fun one for most people to start with, it's just doing a little link-in-bio site. So for example, I have this one here, where you can just really just create sites in seconds. It's crazy.

So I'll just click on this one, but yeah, this should just pull out a little description from it. And basically we're going to make a website out of thin air. It still blows my mind that this is so easy and possible. It feels like taking a seed of an idea and expanding it into a full thing.

Dan Shipper (00:08:52)

That's interesting. So tell me about—while it's building—I'm really into this idea of prompt-gramming, or just generally coding with AI being a new layer of programming abstraction on top of scripting languages, which are built on top of C and C++, which are built on top of assembly, and then assembly is built on top of binary. Tell me about what that looks like as a language and why you think it should count as a language.

Nick Dobos (00:08:36)

Yeah, I guess it's definitely going into areas that I think are new and maybe some people say it shouldn't be a language. I don't really care much how the labels are drawn as much as I just need some way to try and explain the different layers. Because it feels like this new area where I can just give it a prompt in English, it'll spit out a bunch of code and I can then go use that code and either work that into my project, run it in Code Interpreter or something like that. So here I've got this little thing queued up and one of my favorite hotkeys—I was actually able to partner with Netlify and I was just—

Dan Shipper (00:09:15)

Let me just stop you right there. So, I want to go up and just go through what it did for you. So basically you said, link-in-bio, create your website, open PT1 MD to link-in-bio site. So that's the prompt that it was basically pre-filled. So tell me what that prompt means in the GPT setup that you have.

Nick Dobos (00:09:37)

Yeah, so maybe to back it up a little bit, here I’m going to flip into a new conversation. There's so many ways I think you can structure GPTs and some of it is just giving it a simple shape: respond like you're a pirate or respond like you're super happy or respond as if you're a writer or something like that. But I think some of the other ways you can really pre-define ideas and put them in. And something that I tried to do with this that I think is way different from a lot of what other people are doing is giving it a template. So I have a whole bunch of pre-built projects. So this link-in-bio site is the conversation starter button. And now it's just triggering one of the projects. But basically you can come up with any idea. I don't know, I have a coffee next to me, so it's going to be: coffee website.

I was going to do those two words and we'll just see what comes out. And so it's like, okay, how are we going to build a copy website? Let's figure out the structure, the pieces of it. Almost like breaking the task into more parts and, I guess, expanding on that initial thing. And so here, okay, we're going to make a homepage, we're going to make a menu, we're going to make a blog, we're going to make a contact page. And, we're going to figure out what to do.

And you know, now there's a few options here. And so I'm just going to hit N cause that's one of my favorite ones because you can just make websites instantly.

Dan Shipper (00:11:09)

What does N do?

Nick Dobos (00:11:11)

N is one of the hotkeys. There's a whole bunch of hotkeys, which I can show you if you want. You just press K and it'll show you all of them. But this one works with Netlify and basically just takes the code and instantly puts it online. So you'll see in a second, it will have a website just spit out that.

Dan Shipper (00:11:32)

Wow, that's fascinating. So Netlify is sort of a hosting provider. So it's going to write the code, push it to Netlify and then put it online?

Nick Dobos (00:11:38)

Exactly. Yeah. And so the way it's set up is that the website will be ephemeral and will just delete itself after one hour, or you can claim it and like sign up with Netflify and they have a hosting fee. So here we came back, oh, your coffee-themed website is back. So here, click our website and boom, there we go. Is this the most beautiful website in the world? No, right? It's pretty simple, right? But you know, we have just have a little thing set up. We have our little menu. I guess we have three drinks on this coffee site. I guess it has a little blog here. Obviously, this is not a billion-dollar business website, right? But for something that took half a second, and I did two words and one button to spit this out. So yeah, I'm having lots of fun even just doing what's like small, simple projects I can do? Because right now we are definitely limited by how much output can come out of these and the context limits there. But at the same time, it's really fun. And here's another fun trick. Let's make a QR code. And let's see if we can get the URL— Alright, no, we don't want a generator. Stop it. Okay, we will edit this, I guess. For the website URL— Let's see if this works. Normally it does.

Dan Shipper (00:13:12)

So it's saying, “create a QR code for the website URL is a practical—” Is it not right?

Nick Dobos (00:13:16)

Here we go. Generate QR code. Alright, now I will run it. There we go. I had to think for a second, but yeah, this was the little URL that we just created. So yeah, double-check that. Yeah, there we go. And do we get it? And then let's see. Okay, it's going to make us download it. Let me download the file. Open it. And boom, there's our QR code for the website we just made. And I can just go share that with anyone. I don't know if this makes any sense, but you can do all these crazy little motions that seemed so difficult are now super easy with prompts.

Dan Shipper (00:14:09)

Interesting. No, that makes a ton of sense. And, even just that little thing where it's now pushed live to a website, it just takes that little step of like, oh, I got to paste this into Replit or something And it takes that away, which I really love. I think that's so cool. I want to go back to the link-in-bio thing because now that I sort of get the general gist of how this works, I want to understand, so you have these pre-built projects inside of Grimoire. And one of them is this link-in-bio thing—and it sounds like you've created a link-in-bio project that lives inside of the GPT. You upload it as maybe a file in the knowledge base and then when you ask for a link-in-bio site, it knows to take that project and that tells it what to do. Is that how it works?

Nick Dobos (00:14:52)

Yeah, exactly. The basic idea here was that I wanted to solve the blank canvas problem. I feel like some people are , okay, I have this chat thing. What do I ask it? What do I do with it? Especially with programming stuff, there's just so many tutorials out there. They're just explaining these things, they're making it so difficult. Can I just give people a list of fun projects to do? I have this other one where if I just hit P— This should work, we'll see, it's been a little unreliable. But it should actually print out these chapters and parts. And so these are knowledge files that I uploaded as part of Grimoire, which is, I guess in the same way that I don't, maybe your company has some PDFs and you want to go in and read your PDFs or something and ask your PDFs questions. But I decided to put a curriculum of sorts or a launching point of , okay, if you want it to learn to program zero to 100, what does that look like?

I guess also part of the question is like, I think it's very clear to many people that LLMs and GPT-4 and other things are immediately going to be transforming coding. But the question is like, do you learn that first or, how does this get integrated? Because I think as someone who's been doing it for a while I have quite a bit of background knowledge around coding. So applying it to coding becomes much easier, but if someone's brand new to coding, what do we teach them? How does that fit in? I think a lot of teachers are struggling with that. I don't know if this is the correct answer, but I was like, can I give someone a curriculum to go from zero to a full programmer? What does that look like?