Lately I’ve been seeing people using ChatGPT to write code. One guy posted on Twitter about how he used it to make a simple version of Pong “in under 60 seconds”, while another had it write a Python script to rename files.
I wanted to get in on the action, so I asked ChatGPT — the March 14 version — to make a simple to-do list web app. I started off with this request …
I’d like to make a simple to-do web app. Show me the code that would do the following: Display the text “My To-Do List” at the top, with a field beneath where I can type in to-do items. When I type in a new item and hit “enter”, the new item would appear in a list below the input field. When I click on any list in the item, it disappears.
Presto — it cranked out some simple HTML and Javascript, which did exactly what I asked for.
Over the next few minutes, I added a bunch more requests: I told it to add a button called “Save List” that, when you clicked it, would save the list locally on your browser. I told it a couple of Google fonts to use, and asked it for CSS styling to use those fonts. Then I had it add a bit more styling: To change the font size for smaller screens vs. bigger screens, to add bullet points before each item on the list, and to add a light gray dotted line around the input box. Each time I asked for a revision, ChatGPT would tell me where to cut and paste the new code, and what the code was doing.