I’ve been critical of Chat-GPT in the past, so it’s only fair I tell you about a good experience I’ve had with the chatbot.

Three years ago I moved my site from WordPress to Ghost.

It went smoothly enough, although that’s a story for another time.

I had a whole load of customisations that I’d made to the WordPress Theme’s PHP code over the years. I’m no programmer, but I did learn enough PHP and CSS to tweak the WordPress site to my taste.

Ghost uses something called Handlebars instead of PHP. And yes, I may not have used those names in a programmerly way. Did I mention I’m not a programmer?

When I saw Handlebars code, I realised repeating my WordPress tweaks on Ghost was not going to be straightforward. To put it bluntly, I don’t have a clue what is going on in Handlebars code even if, at times, it looks a lot like PHP.

Earlier today, I fed my PHP tweaks and the Handlebars code for my Ghost theme into Chat-GPT and asked how I could get the effect of this piece of code in that piece of code?

The answer looked too confusing for a non-programmer to deal with.

I tried again, one tweak at a time. So far Chat-GPT helped me fix three of the outstanding tweaks. This isn’t a complex task for a computer and AI, but it’s one I couldn’t handle myself and isn’t worth the expense of hiring a coder to handle on my behalf.

It’s quite possible that as I work through some of the other tweaks, I’ll get more of a grip on Handlebars as I look closely to understand what the chatbot does. Or maybe not.

Either way, I’ve finally found a practical use for ChatGPT.