Pangram Tester (and ✨ChatGPT auto-commit)

Analyzes pangram sentences as you type. Try the app here.

A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once, such as "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

Features:

• Configurable alphabet (e.g. for non-English languages)
• Highlights unique letters in the sentence (the first occurrence of each letter)
• Lists (and counts) missing letters
• Gives a count of the total number of letters in the sentence
• Suggests words to add based on missing letters, using a word list from dwyl/english-words. Words are scored based on the missing letters they add, and penalized for redundant letters.
• Draws arrows from redundant letters to the prior occurrence of the letter. This is a little silly, but I wanted something more symmetrical than just highlighting the first occurrence of each letter.
• Updates as you type

Methodology

I just used ChatGPT to write the first fully working, and nice looking, version of this app.

I did use my programming expertise to formulate the prompts and to give some feedback on the code, but I didn't write any of the code myself (for the first version).

It's interesting that it was easier to create this application using AI than to search the web for an existing solution of comparable quality.

When it came to adding the word suggestion feature, after several tries I gave up on using ChatGPT. It was able to scaffold out the feature, but it would freeze up the browser, or after telling it to use a web worker, it couldn't get the ranking right, among other things.

So the word suggestion and redundancy graphing are written manually, and I did a bunch of clean up once I was working with the code directly.

ChatGPT auto-commit

Export code blocks from a ChatGPT conversation into the git commit history of a target file.

• If you make a simple app using ChatGPT, copying its results to JS Fiddle or CodePen, you can use this to automatically commit the results at each step.
• You can continue the conversation, re-run the script, and it will commit the new code without duplicating commits.
• This works by matching the current code to the chat history, and ignoring messages earlier than (or matching) the current code.
• With this strategy, if you want to create a new conversation, and paste in your current code, it should (theoretically) be able to work naturally, since it doesn't need to line up the whole commit history with a whole chat history, only a snapshot of the current code.
• If it doesn't find the current code in the chat history, it will abort with an error message for safety.
  • If this happens, you can either paste your updated code into the chat (theoretically), or copy the latest code from the chat into the file and look at the git diff to see what has changed. The git diff will likely be reversed; if the colors bother you you could commit it, revert it, and look at the diff of the reverted commit. Or probably with some git flag.

Caveats:

• It can only handle single-file applications. You must specify the file name and language code.
  • This is similar to the concept of Single Page Applications, but SPAs often are split into multiple files (which isn't supported), and this tool isn't specific to web apps (you could use any number of languages).
• If you include code in a prompt, it won't currently commit it as it should. It will either get confused between response/prompt, or miss it and be unable to continue creating commits for later code. (I don't think I've tested this.)
• This does not use the OpenAI API (TODO), but rather scrapes the chat history from the web page. This is fragile and will definitely break in the future.
• It does not preserve time/date information. This should be easy to add, once it uses the API, assuming such information is provided.
• As code gets long, ChatGPT starts to (reasonably) elide sections of code, such as CSS if unchanged. Trivial changes like adding a charset declaration may make it omit most of your code, and once it's done so, it's probably more likely to do it again. This workflow is unsustainable, but it can be fun for jump-starting a project.
  • Eventually I gave up on using the auto-commit since I would have had to paste all my app code into the chat to sync it, and just went back to copying and pasting, and then gave up on trying to do it all with ChatGPT since it couldn't do the word suggestion feature very well.
• Once it's written some code, it prefers to make mild adjustments to it, even when asking it to make structural changes. This makes it an awkward decision between trying to get it to mold it or starting over from an earlier state where it's freer / more flexible.
  • The behavior of keeping tightly to the existing code often makes sense when its your code in question, since you likely have good reasons for writing it the way you did, but it feels like it gives almost equal weight to code it wrote itself, untested.

License

To the extent possible under law, Isaiah Odhner has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Pangram Tester and the ChatGPT automatic git commit tool. This work is published from: United States.