Either there is a considerable art to prompting GPT to produce code, or it is a pretty haphazard process. By this time I have made probably a dozen attempts to coax GPT into writing code for a flipcard that randomly pulls a line of text from a file, parses it, and displays the first part on the front, and the second part on the back.

After a day of trying, I got that to work — except later realized it didn’t actually work under safari. I asked chatGPT and it told me about safari and webkit and how to change styles, but those things did not seem to do anything.

I decided I’d try starting over, and asking chatGPT to build up much simpler flashcards, and see if I could get something very very simple (e.g. not reading from a file) to work across platforms. But the short story is that, over several attempts, and in spite of having been successful previously, I was unable to get even simple static flashcards working on any platform.

After a couple of attempts, I’ve decided that there are better ways to pass time, especially as I did, in the whole process, iron out a couple of irksome quirks on my site.

I will also say that I believe that although chatGPT isn’t great at coding, I find it quite useful at alerting me to various problems (like caches and safari/webkit incompatibilites), even if it doesn’t always success in solving them.

I will mention that, as i think I summarized in the previous post, that developoing on the live set does require that I always

Refresh the file cache on my web platform, and
Force browsers to clear their various caches — Firefox, in particular, requires <command>-<shift>-R … just reloading the page doesn’t do it. I think there are multiple caches — possibly one for AJAX generated by Javascript — that a reload doesn’t effect.

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