Summary: It has actually been a few months since my site came into existence. But being a newcomer to Lemmy I thought I’d post my experience once again here.

I had close to zero experience in web site development. I had never written a line of code in PHP nor used a PostgreSQL database, let alone creating and managing one.

However, I thought this lack of experience made me a good candidate to test just how powerful ChatGPT is. After two weeks of on-and-off construction, I finally completed a completely functional website that serves as an “online guest book” and is open for everyone to try out. A feat that I probably could never have achieved without any help.

Here are some of the amazing highlights of how ChatGPT helped:

  • Debugging - I took the approach of using a website design software and incorporating snippets provided by ChatGPT. Very often, that would lead to unknown errors, and I just found myself copying and pasting the entire file and giving one single word of instruction to ChatGPT - debug. Time and again, it managed to pinpoint the errors after a few back and forths.

  • Geolocation and other features - I just told ChatGPT what I wanted to do, and it pointed me in the right direction very quickly. In the case of geolocation, it led me to the right library to use that I had no idea about (geoip geolite2), walked me through the procedure to install it on my NAS, and got it up and running within something like one hour. I am absolutely certain it would have taken me days if not weeks to get it going given my programming background or lack thereof.

  • Backend admin site (that only I get to use so no fancy formatting required) - I did not even have to write a single line of code for it. I just told ChatGPT what I wanted the backend admin site to do, and it churned out 4 files for me just like that (with the usual problem of stopping midway through then having to encourage it to continue). I told ChatGPT what errors I encountered with the files, and it kept revising the code until it started running smoothly after a few tries. Two hours later, the backend admin site was done.

Anyway, give this site a try and see what you think: https://www.stringtone.com. The concept is simple, and all of the intelligence and many of the security measures came directly from ChatGPT.

It has been a fun project, but yes, I still have no clue how I can construct something similar without getting ChatGPT’s help.