A few times a week over the last several months, I have paired with ChatGPT to work on Python scripts that solve problems that I would otherwise have spent less time on. Some might feel too niche or even too tedious that I would otherwise not take the time to work on. Most of the time, these are scratching an itch and solving a problem on my mind.
Because of the time constraint, I have been impressed with the results. I usually spend 10 to 15 minutes prompting ChatGPT, then I spend 10 to 15 minutes refactoring the script, adding Typer, and refining the code. Sometimes, this involved copying all or parts of my script and pasting it back into ChatGPT to have it refine or refactor some section of code.
YouTube Playlist to Markdown file
My YouTube playlist to markdown script is helpful for quickly getting a list of video URLs and titles back from a YouTube playlist. I have used this for DjangoCon US and a few other conferences to help collect links for social media and a few times for the Django News Newsletter.
ChatGPT even documented the process, including links for how to set permissions for the YouTube API.
Use Playwright to pull data out of the Django Admin
I have database access for most projects, but I recently needed to export a list of RSS feeds from the admin of a Django website. ChatGPT could quickly write a Playwright script to log in to the website, access a list page, and pull the feed field from the detail page. The script generated a JSON feed and could understand pagination and how to page through the links.
GitHub Issues and Pull Request templates
For the Awesome Django project, I asked ChatGPT to generate GitHub Issues and Pull Request templates based on my criteria. Once the templates were complete, I prompted ChatGPT to help me write a script that uses the GitHub API to read a pull request and validate the answers filled out while adding some other contextual data that makes it easier to verify the request.
Modeling HTML with PyDantic
I am still trying to figure out what to do with the project, but I asked ChatGPT to use Pydantic to create a class that could represent HTML tags. Once I was happy with the API, I asked ChatGPT to represent all HTML tags. After a few more prompts, I could read, write, and represent an HTML document using this script using Pydantic.
Outro
I’m still determining how useful these scripts are, but I have enjoyed these quick sessions to write a one-off script or to solve problems that come up a few times a year that never seemed worth the time spent trying to write it from scratch.
