Series: How I use LLMs and ChatGPT
Posts about ways I'm using LLM tools such as ChatGPT in my own work.
This series starts with my experiments using GPT-3 in June 2022, so if you are looking for more recent material be sure to scroll to the bottom!
How to use the GPT-3 language model
I ran a Twitter poll the other day asking if people had tried GPT-3 and why or why not. The winning option, by quite a long way, was “No, I don’t know how to”. So here’s how to try it out, for free, without needing to write any code.
[... 838 words]Using GPT-3 to explain how code works
One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast amount of source code.
[... 1,983 words]AI assisted learning: Learning Rust with ChatGPT, Copilot and Advent of Code
I’m using this year’s Advent of Code to learn Rust—with the assistance of GitHub Copilot and OpenAI’s new ChatGPT.
[... 2,661 words]Over-engineering Secret Santa with Python cryptography and Datasette
We’re doing a family Secret Santa this year, and we needed a way to randomly assign people to each other without anyone knowing who was assigned to who.
[... 2,044 words]I built a ChatGPT plugin to answer questions about data hosted in Datasette
Yesterday OpenAI announced support for ChatGPT plugins. It’s now possible to teach ChatGPT how to make calls out to external APIs and use the responses to help generate further answers in the current conversation.
[... 1,801 words]AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects.
[... 3,334 words]Running Python micro-benchmarks using the ChatGPT Code Interpreter alpha
Today I wanted to understand the performance difference between two Python implementations of a mechanism to detect changes to a SQLite database schema. I rendered the difference between the two as this chart:
[... 2,939 words]How I make annotated presentations
Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.
[... 2,128 words]Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL‑E 3
Last year I wrote about my initial experiments with DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image generation model. I’ve been having an absurd amount of fun playing with its sequel, DALL-E 3 recently. Here are some notes, including a peek under the hood and some notes on the leaked system prompt.
[... 3,505 words]Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat?
The biggest announcement from last week’s OpenAI DevDay (and there were a LOT of announcements) was GPTs. Users of ChatGPT Plus can now create their own, custom GPT chat bots that other Plus subscribers can then talk to.
[... 5,699 words]Claude and ChatGPT for ad-hoc sidequests
Here is a short, illustrative example of one of the ways in which I use Claude and ChatGPT on a daily basis.
[... 1,754 words]Building and testing C extensions for SQLite with ChatGPT Code Interpreter
I wrote yesterday about how I used Claude and ChatGPT Code Interpreter for simple ad-hoc side quests—in that case, for converting a shapefile to GeoJSON and merging it into a single polygon.
[... 4,612 words]llm cmd undo last git commit—a new plugin for LLM
I just released a neat new plugin for my LLM command-line tool: llm-cmd. It lets you run a command to to generate a further terminal command, review and edit that command, then hit <enter> to execute it or <ctrl-c> to cancel.
Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser
I attended the Story Discovery At Scale data journalism conference at Stanford this week. One of the perennial hot topics at any journalism conference concerns data extraction: how can we best get data out of PDFs and images?
[... 2,263 words]Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus
files-to-prompt is a new tool I built to help me pipe several files at once into prompts to LLMs such as Claude and GPT-4.
[... 3,235 words]AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now
I gave a talk last month at the Story Discovery at Scale data journalism conference hosted at Stanford by Big Local News. My brief was to go deep into the things we can use Large Language Models for right now, illustrated by a flurry of demos to help provide starting points for further conversations at the conference.
[... 6,081 words]Building search-based RAG using Claude, Datasette and Val Town
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique for adding extra “knowledge” to systems built on LLMs, allowing them to answer questions against custom information not included in their training data. A common way to implement this is to take a question from a user, translate that into a set of search queries, run those against a search engine and then feed the results back into the LLM to generate an answer.
[... 3,372 words]django-http-debug, a new Django app mostly written by Claude
Yesterday I finally developed something I’ve been casually thinking about building for a long time: django-http-debug. It’s a reusable Django app—something you can pip install into any Django project—which provides tools for quickly setting up a URL that returns a canned HTTP response and logs the full details of any incoming request to a database table.
Building a tool showing how Gemini Pro can return bounding boxes for objects in images
I was browsing through Google’s Gemini documentation while researching how different multi-model LLM APIs work when I stumbled across this note in the vision documentation:
[... 1,792 words]Notes on using LLMs for code
I was recently the guest on TWIML—the This Week in Machine Learning & AI podcast. Our episode is titled Supercharging Developer Productivity with ChatGPT and Claude with Simon Willison, and the focus of the conversation was the ways in which I use LLM tools in my day-to-day work as a software developer and product engineer.
[... 861 words]Video scraping: extracting JSON data from a 35 second screen capture for less than 1/10th of a cent
The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails.
[... 1,220 words]Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
I’m a huge fan of Claude’s Artifacts feature, which lets you prompt Claude to create an interactive Single Page App (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and then view the result directly in the Claude interface, iterating on it further with the bot and then, if you like, copying out the resulting code.
[... 2,273 words]Run a prompt to generate and execute jq programs using llm-jq
llm-jq is a brand new plugin for LLM which lets you pipe JSON directly into the llm jq command along with a human-language description of how you’d like to manipulate that JSON and have a jq program generated and executed for you on the fly.
You can now run prompts against images, audio and video in your terminal using LLM
I released LLM 0.17 last night, the latest version of my combined CLI tool and Python library for interacting with hundreds of different Large Language Models such as GPT-4o, Llama, Claude and Gemini.
[... 1,399 words]Prompts.js
I’ve been putting the new o1 model from OpenAI through its paces, in particular for code. I’m very impressed—it feels like it’s giving me a similar code quality to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, at least for Python and JavaScript and Bash... but it’s returning output noticeably faster.
[... 1,118 words]