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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
Haha, if you look at the guest book, you see so many people just trying to check if you sanitize your inputs.
and at least one of them seems to have been successful based on the response
Yes ! I had to quickly change the record in the backend database and ask gpt for modifying the code…
Out of curiosity, was it an SQL injection or an XSS exploit?
XSS, causing a popup message to appear (or something along that line, don’t remember exactly)
Yeah I probably would have done the same thing… lol