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Comment by cloudking | Hacker News Reader

I've found expanding conversations with GPT-4 are most effective for building code snippets. Start with asking for the basic functionality and continue expanding the feature set. Here's an example of building a simple local frontend app to interface with the TTS API https://chat.openai.com/share/8ea1e3ea-0763-4118-8c83-a2f5ea...

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I agree that an iterative style of coding works great with GPT. That's generally how I code as well, whether collaborating with GPT or on my own. Start with "hello project" and then incrementally add functionality and complexity.

But I have to ask, how do you update your files when iterating on code within the ChatGPT web UI? Do you just copy the code from your browser and manually find and replace the old code chunks in your files?

I ask because my open source coding assistant aider automates away all of that hassle. It lets GPT edit your local files directly. It does a bunch more beyond that, but just the ergonomics of letting GPT edit your files is a huge win. The coding iterations become effortless.

You might want to give it a try if you're using GPT a lot for coding? You do need to provide your own OpenAI API key, so you pay them for token usage as opposed to the all-you-can-eat $20/month ChatGPT web UI.

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider

I copy and paste chunks for small changes, or ask for fully updated code and copy the whole thing if there are complex changes. Your project sounds very interesting! I'll give it a try, thank you

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