Things I did usingChatGPT in My First Six Months

14 min readMar 5, 2024

Introduction: The Beginning

It was the day that changed my image of the future forever. I remember it as clearly as my brain lets me picture it. It was a rainy day in autumn when I wandered through the depths of YouTube. As a 15-year-old nerd, I was taken on a journey by YouTube’s already well-functioning suggestion algorithm. I was tossed around between some of the old memes like the “evolution of dance” and other useless, but fantastic, videos like “Nyan cat — 10 HOURS”. While Gandalf was nodding at me in the main section of the website, a small thumbnail appeared in the proposed videos. “Changing a voice with AI”, my mind went “whaat”, and I clicked the video. I watched a keynote from an Adobe conference where a tool they had developed was demonstrated. They were able to alter the words the voice said, while the recording only contained 10 minutes of speech. I felt like I just experienced witchcraft. How was this technology even possible? I believed no human could create such sophisticated algorithms or perform the edit manually. Especially with the ease and versatility they showed during that demo. I was desperate to harness this otherworldly magic, feeling as though it could propel me 10 years into the future.

Little did I know that years later, on a similar day and on the same platform, an immensely improved version of the algorithm would introduce me to another transformative video. This was a video about Open AI’s ChatGPT. I had heard about OpenAI before; they had conducted AI hide-and-seek research that went viral. I also knew they were behind Dall-e 2. I used it occasionally and was always amazed by its output. But now, I felt the ground shift beneath me as if I had stepped 10 years into the future. The only thing that stood between me and becoming a futuristic wizard was an account at OpenAI. Luckily for me, I already had one from playing with Dall-e. Unfortunately for my sleep that night, I spent 4 hours straight on a jaw-dropping prompting streak. And I have never turned back. Today, half a year after the GPT-4 release, I’ve been privy to a lot of its magic. I’ve been amazed both by the responses from the incredible GPT and by my collaboration with this futuristic marvel. Therefore I started to write down what achievements came across and in which ways I used my chats. Here are 16 things I thought were memorable enough to write down.

Create a full (playable) board game.
Refactor a VueJS project into a Svelte project.
Create a native iOS app (Swift).
Created a 5-day trip planned to Faro by ChatGPT (including choosing a destination, type of activities, and the best local meals).
Created a Belgium holiday playlist with hits from Belgium.
Found a flaw in the PostNL’s terms and conditions.
Created a custom survey website.
Create my first Visual Studio Code extension.
Created my first Electron app.
Created a custom history story while walking around on a historical landmark.
Created a Slidev custom layout template.
Got multiple: Cartoon drawing suggestions. Social Media posts rewritten. Icebreakers/crowd interaction ideas. Custom quizzes.
Got a lot of: Text translated, Brainstorming ideas, Refactored code, Creating dummy data, Prompts for AI-Generated Images (A.K.A. Midjourney), Text summaries.
Having ChatGPT as a judge in a hackathon
Found multiple concepts I didn’t know the name of and I could not get a good Google search query for. (visual onomatopoeia)
Created a new language that has never been spoken or written down before.

Embarking on the Adventure

The first steps I took into this unknown territory were the usual, asking for weird, interesting stuff. I wanted to have the movie Nemo summarized only in emojis. GPT gave me perfect ‘unknown’ lyrics of a ‘newly discovered’ song made by Queen. It looked a lot like a cheap rip-off of the hit ‘We Are the Champions’. But that might be the point, right? Would such lyrics not look and sound a lot like one of their hits, but just weren’t good enough and a revised version made the album? I also discovered the way I was able to get information and started exploring the way of the tone to use in my prompts. I remembered that I wanted to have a story written by GPT and prompting it to see if it could tell me a dream I couldn’t remember anymore. Instead, I got a message telling me it was not able to provide such information because of ethical reasons. Then, instead of asking about a ‘dream I couldn’t remember’, I inquired about a ‘book I read’ that I couldn’t recall. And it gave me the perfect new story I originally hoped for when asking for the dream.

During this time, I completed my first significant project in collaboration with ChatGPT. I have always been a fan of board games, small and big, how great would it be to create one yourself? I picked three of my favorite board games from that time and fed the rulebooks to a chat. Two days later I had a fully multipage rulebook of a never-played, new game. TimeQuest. Together with over 100 cards to use in the game, estimated durations, balanced values and thresholds, and artwork created by Midjourney. I put everything together using editing software and sent everything to a copy shop. Two more days later I was already playing this game, which worked almost perfectly on the first try. There were 3 unbalanced cards we came across and 5 cards with references to unknown game items or mechanics. Besides that, you couldn’t tell this game had never been played or tested before. Like we just picked up a new game from our local game shop.

Broadening Horizons: The Travel Tales

Interestingly enough, these new wizard-like skills I now possessed in the palm of my hand first started to integrate into my personal life. My work and coding transformation came later. One of the things I had always struggled with was planning a holiday. With my background, I had never been on actual travels that required planning. So with no overseas travel experience, I started to check with ChatGPT what was possible. I created a prompt with what my partner and I would like to do on our holiday. I included details such as the dates, type of location, budget, and desired activities. In mere minutes we had a full schedule, checked the tickets online, bought them, booked a hotel, and in 8 days we were sitting on an airplane on our way to Faro, Portugal. The time spent visiting a travel planner’s office would have been much longer. And now we have a trip fully customized to our own needs and preferences.

Following the initial travel guide suggestions, I also asked for local food recommendations. We tried multiple delicious recommendations, also tailored to what tastes we liked at home. Besides that, while not all benefits were focused on productivity, they still highlighted the ease and possibilities of integrating ChatGPT into one’s life.” During our holiday we would like a playlist with local music to listen to. So I asked ChatGPT to show some of its creativity, by curating a playlist of 100 songs that are (or have been) popular in the local area of our destination. The only thing I did was convert the list into URLs + parameters of my favorite streaming service. And voila I had a list of 100 links to add directly to a playlist. And what a pleasure it was listening to all those local hits and vibing to the right music during our holiday.

Overcoming Challenges: The Tech Quests

Now we delve into the realm where I use this ‘magic’ for the greater good. Like many developers over the years, I’ve started small projects to solve minor problems. One such project was a browser-based tool designed to help someone convert digital time to analog, and it also provided guidance on how to reference time in conversations. I knew someone with dyscalculia who struggled to understand and use time in various situations. Years ago, I created a website to help that person understand which phrasing to use at different times of the day, including precise timings or those rounded to, for example, 15-minute intervals. This was a tool made in VueJS and it happened that I missed the emails that the account that I was using to host this would expire. I was unaware that this person was using it on an almost daily basis. So I needed to put it live somewhere fast. But since VueJS got multiple updates and I wanted to try out Svelte for a while I fed the idea of the tool and some of the files into ChatGPT and it perfectly converted the VueJS project to a working Svelte app. This took only a couple of prompts and most of the time I was copy-pasting from VSCode to ChatGPT and back.

But this wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. I would have been able to convert this myself, I know code, I knew VueJS, and was able to fire up a Svelte project. However, it significantly expedited the process for me. It showed me that I didn’t need extensive knowledge of the tool I was converting to. So I started to think of one of my old desires. I’ve always wanted to be able to create a native iOS app. Don’t get me wrong; I had considered this many times before but never prioritized learning an entirely new area of development. To be honest, the potential challenges and learning curve held me back as well. I didn’t want to go over tutorials creating todo apps, getting your first “Hello, World!” screen, or following someone else’s journey. However, I then turned to ChatGPT for assistance. “You are a senior native iOS developer; help me publish this tool on the App Store. Give me all the steps and ask what you need to know to provide me with personalized instruction and process.” One weekend later I had my first app submitted to the Apple App Store review process. Where, again, most of the time that weekend I spent thinking I was smarter than ChatGPT and trying to solve bugs and errors by myself. Shamefully, often they came from my own doing, or simply because I didn’t carefully read and follow GPT’s instructions. Having this personal teacher and mentor was incredible. It felt like a milestone in my collaboration with this ‘future magic’, just like movie scenes where the protagonist discovers their hidden powers. After this process, I felt impressed by what the future would bring, and how it feels there are no limits to this technology.

Unexpected Treasures

Throughout my journey over the past six months, I stumbled upon some unexpected treasures. Some hidden magic gems I didn’t expect.I integrated ChatGPT more and more into my daily workflow. (Off the record, I’m really glad OpenAI extended some of the ‘max messages per x hours’ thresholds. And I didn’t run out of messages anymore.) I got to the point where, most of the time, I just preferred ChatGPT over my normal workflow of googling and browsing forums to get to my answers. When trying to figure out what to do with a lost package at a big Dutch parcel company, I was able to figure out that their ‘Terms of agreement’ kind of contradicted the law. According to Dutch postal law, the courier can clearly be held responsible for failure to deliver a package. Including no limit to the value of the package and extra payment for an insurance feature. The only thing needed is for you to be registered, so the courier is aware of who the sender is. This excludes letters put inside drop boxes, it’s not known at the courier who posted that letter. But when you send a package you are registered as the sender. This allows you to hold the postal service accountable and legally responsible for the package’s delivery. In the end, the package was traced and found and I didn’t need to file an issue.

Another treasure we didn’t know would work was making ChatGPT a judge on an AI Hackathon I organized. ChatGPT was able to rank the contributions and give feedback on the presented ideas to such an extent it felt like part of the team of judges. In the judging room, the interactions were elevated when ChatGPT presented strong arguments, convincing other judges to reconsider their top choices. It also was pleasantly unbiased, while feeling human-like all the time, it didn’t take in preferences for persons or previous experiences with contestants. I’m looking forward to seeing ChatGPT being used in a way like this at a more public event or show. In this context, I appreciated the added friendliness that OpenAI has programmed into ChatGPT. It’s designed to be polite and politically correct; how much fairer could a judge be? Instead of mocking someone for a potentially bad idea or performance, it focuses on the best aspects and highlights them. While still providing a good conclusion and fair ranking/rating of the contestants.

Crafting and Creating: Magic Moments

And the creation of new projects and things continues. The massively reduced time needed to create wild ideas to a proof-of-concept and not needing knowledge of a subject made me create way more little projects. Just my curiosity about the technique, coupled with a mind full of ideas, allowed me to turn multiple brain farts into reality. I wanted to explore the possibility of converting a short video into an m3u playlist, where the combined album art of the mp3s would form a low-frame-rate version of the original video. Only to not work out as intended, because my car’s player doesn’t load the next file quickly enough. However, instead of dwelling on that, I gained a new experience when ChatGPT helped me create an Electron app to convert a mp4 into a playlist. Similarly, I’ve always had a weird glitch that happens in my mind when I see a “close tabs to right” option in the right-click menu of a tab in Google Chrome or VSCode. Why only “right”? That’s unfair, why is the other side left out? (Sorry, pun intended.) A couple of days later the whole world was able to use my first VSCode extension I wrote, with not only “close tabs to right”, but 5 more features ChatGPT came with, which I found way more useful than my own idea. Close all unsaved files, close all files from the same directory, and other features like that. An interesting challenge arose from the limitations of ChatGPT’s training data. It didn’t include the most recent updates in the VSCode API. They happened after the model was trained. So here I collaborated even more, providing ChatGPT with data of my own and sharing more snippets and parts of documentation pages than I ever did before.

Some months ago it was time for me to use the ultimate spell with this unique future magic. Regarding creation, what is the most non-tangible, but still core/basic thing you can create? Language! And since this magic is mainly centered around the concept of language, this shouldn’t be a problem, right? And it was not! This was the thing that was the most easy to do with the most advanced results. The first reply after my prompt was already the outline for a newly created/never seen before language called: Luminara. Let ChatGPT introduce it to you by themselves and share an introduction to this never-seen or spoken-before language:

Luminara Lingvo Introdukto
Saluton! Bonvenon al la mondo de Luminara. Luminara estas konstruita lingvo, inspirita de pluraj Eŭropaj lingvoj. La celo estas krei facilan kaj intuician lingvon por parolantoj de Eŭropaj originaj lingvoj.
Fonologio: Luminara uzas simplan vokalan kaj konsonantan sistemon, bazitan sur la sonoj de la angla, nederlanda kaj aliaj Eŭropaj lingvoj.
Gramatiko: La strukturo de frazoj en Luminara estas Subjekto-Verbo Objekto (SVO), simila al la angla. Adjektivoj venas antaŭ la substantivo kiun ili modifas.
Vortostoko: Vortoj en Luminara estas elektitaj por esti facile rekonitaj kaj lernitaj de parolantoj de Eŭropaj lingvoj.
Espero vi ĝuas lerni kaj paroli Luminara!

Glimpses of Daily Adventures

While this future magic can handle all the heavy lifting, it’s still fun to play around with it. Since I like jokes and humor a lot, I have asked ChatGPT for jokes many many times, sometimes for sketches, or with cartoon descriptions included. At other moments, I was just giggling at the one-liners it created for me on specific topics. My posts on social media became way more attractive when I let ChatGPT convert my boring text snippets into stunning posts that one cannot scroll past without them drawing attention. Since the project I’m working on is bilingual, I often have to provide text in two languages. I had to translate many messages from Dutch to English and vice versa. Now, I often write my message in English and, when necessary, let ChatGPT translate it into Dutch as well. It’s something I’m able to do myself, but just copy/paste and I’m done. This is faster than rewriting and translating a text multiple times a week. I like to use Midjourney to create images but often want a vivid description with many exaggerated words, ChatGPT to the rescue. Showing it’s capable of creatively choosing words to spark the imagination.

During a visit to Waterloo, the site of Napoleon’s last battle, my partner and I walked around the historical locations where soldiers had fought. As much as they do their best to show the historical atmosphere, it’s been overtaken by exploiting every inch for the tourists. Every piece of the landscape is turned into a legend for the tourists. “This is the last stone Napoleon sat on”, “That dry spot in the grass is where he put down his tent.”, “Buy here the same dish that was Napoleon’s last meal he ever ate.”. Amid all this commerce and curtains in front of the past, ChatGPT came to rescue us. When we walked through the fields, ChatGPT wrote a personalized story of that last battle, As if our great-great-grandparents might have met each other there in the now peaceful environment. Everything around us started breathing the original historic breath that we hadn’t felt before. Only by asking for a simple story about that battle that went on. On our way back to the car, I made ChatGPT change the story into sci-fi. So, after receiving an educational and historical lecture, we immediately got the same experience, but entertainingly and amusingly. Imagine taking your teenage kids to a place like that, wanting to educate them on some historical moments. And being able to absorb that history in a style they prefer.

Conclusion: Reflections at the Campfire

Now, six months into the discovery of this futuristic magic, I’m sitting around a campfire. Next to me sits a character representing my personal life, one that can transform ideas into usable tools and content. On the other side, I see the character representing my career. It looks a bit scary, and I wonder if the effort it put into learning to code over the years will still be valuable in the future. Is its job title still going to be around? But on the other hand, I see a massive burst of energy and enthusiasm in that character. Ready to grow and scale to new heights with everything it had seen in the past 6 months. Across me, I see a character peeking into the darkness, in the same direction our journey is going… Its whole appearance is breathing curiosity, still hyped from everything it saw today, processing the dopamine it got from all the amazing moments. I understand we need to be cautious, as such power can be used for not-so-good purposes. Just like with magic. But I hope and believe there is a legion of masters of magic out there that will keep this magic from making a bad impact. And you can be part of that legion too.

While writing this metaphor, I’ve come to understand that this article isn’t merely a series of separate achievements or projects. They are telling me how ChatGPT transformed me and my life on such short notice. The upcoming adventures promise to be awe-inspiring, and I know I’ll experience countless jaw-dropping moments. The journey is ongoing and will take a lifetime. I’m not sure how long it takes for my next big out-of-this-world dream to appear. I don’t know when the next keynote will show something way more magical than adjusting a voice. What I do know is I have never been amazed so many times in just 6 months. AI took me on a tour past my creativity, sparking new ideas, and providing me with more capabilities than I could ever imagine. My advice to anyone comes from the bottom of my heart: go, play, and have fun. With this future AI magic and tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Elevenlabs, you will be amazed; I can assure you of that. Beyond that, this technology has the power to bring about transformation. Just invite me to your campfire in 6 months and I’m interested to hear what change it brought you and the things you achieved!