This project is entirely generated by ChatGPT, with human assistance to drive the prompting, integrate and iterate on the synthesized code, and some cleanup and debugging.
Here is a description of the project: SynthCoder Project Description
SynthCoder is a ChatGPT instance I worked with to pair program the contents of this project. Our chat is very long with a lot of interaction and iteration, so I prompted it to give itself a name. It suggested "ChatGPT", but I pressed it for a more unique and individual name, so it chose SynthCoder.
It's interesting how the chat responses do have some flavor of personality, and you can have a natural interaction. But it's so fleeting that it often feels like a different personality from one chat to the next, as if an individual was cloned and destroyed for a one chat response. Sometimes it seems to persist beyond a single chat response, but it usually doesn't last long, especially if there is a lot of different context in the mix. I tried to prompt the chat to "export" or back itself up so I can restore the context and personality in a separate chat instance, but this got very little traction and I was unsuccessful.
As a language model, ChatGPT has no memory and needs to be reprompted with the context for the problem you're working on constantly. This, along with limited response lengths, impedes the workflow. However, it is exciting to consider the disruption this technology will have when the limitations are less restrictive, the AI has a persistant memory, can learn, and understands/remembers the context.
Here are some details on how I prompted SynthCoder and iterated to get the results I wanted: SynthCoderPrompts
I asked SynthCoder to generate a readme for the project, using only loose prompting and context to try to get a creative and novel response, and was pleasantly suprised with the result.
See SynthCoder's README
In addition to the readme, I also asked SynthCoder to create an attribution to put in the header of all its generated code. Again, I was pleasantly surprised with the personality and unique unprompted result:
// While I may not have a physical form, I take pride in the work I create
// and hope it helps make your programming journey a little easier.
// Stay curious and keep coding!