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

ReadPo
2 min readSep 16, 2023

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Screenshot of Chat Shelf interface
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.

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