TinkerQuest - ChatGPT Work needs some love
Do you also have a notepad with a dozen ideas on your phone? Stuff that would make life even better or is just cool and interesting to build? I do. One idea is to help my 8yo son to learn 3d design so he can do his own 3d prints.
I also want to improve my understanding and intuition about building things with AI. I use it extensively at work but I don‘t believe I properly understand that tool yet. So, with this series I try to get some cool stuff out into the world while learning more about AI.
It is day one for me and I already got some first insights:
- ChatGPT Work on the iPhone needs more love. It is buggy and somehow consumes more tokens than my local codex.
- Garbage in/garbage out still holds true. If I don't know what I want and don't define quality signals by which to measure it, the results won’t be great.
- I am less certain that a spec-first approach is the way to go. It always felt waterfall-ish (a lot, actually). Maybe fast prototyping and narrowing down the requirements that way is the better way to go?
Anyway, let’s start from the beginning. My son has an iPad and the whole learning experience has to work on that. It should be simple, interactive, and work side-by-side with some free CAD app.
My private MacBook is so old that it barely manages to open ChatGPT in the browser anymore. Plus, I’m always moving around, so ChatGPT Work on my iPhone together with voice is the way to go. Except, I instantly hit some limits: skill creation that only works on desktop, missing files, and no direct file editing. So I am switching to Google Docs as my file system and giving Sol access. At least that works.
After almost an hour of setup pains, I am finally able to talk to Sol. “Hey - let’s do research on a 3d design course for my 8yo son. The CAD software has to work on an iPad as well as the course. I also want Youtube links for visual explanations and it should have some tasks in it.” Not exactly what I wrote but you get the idea. It is vague partially because I want to see what Sol can make out of that and partially because I haven’t really thought that problem through. Alas Sol comes back with a full-looking course with videos, challenges, and questions and TinkerCAD1 as the software to use.
Did bare-minimum input vibing just work? Nope. My son and I try it and realize there is no onboarding, no context, and after one decent video exercise, the next chapter abruptly starts with a new creator, which confuses us both.
Sol also couldn’t provide decent support for my son. How should it? It doesn’t “see” what he is doing and its only answers are textual while this problem is highly visual. This is just a crappy learning experience.
Back to the drawing board. But at least I already have a name for this project: TinkerQuest. That is something. Plus, the skills I developed at work don’t really cut here with fast MVP projects. So I will start from scratch and build everything anew.