Open Thinkering

Menu

Tag: ChatGPT

AI for boring project tasks

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Yesterday, WAO ran a pre-mortem for a new project we’re kicking off. We used Whimsical, but wanted the results to be in a spreadsheet for easy reference. This is the kind of thing that used to take probably an hour of my life and was a boring task. LLMs like GPT-4o make it easy:

Screenshot of Whimsical board with the instructions: We ran a pre-mortem activity and I've attached the output. Working step-by-step, I'd like you to: 1. List all of the risks (yellow sticky notes), grouping them by theme (blue stickies). The sticky notes are grouped horizontally. 2. List all of the preventative measures (orange stickies) for each of the risks 3. List all of the mitigating actions (green stickies) for each of the risks 4. Create a table that I can copy into a Google spreadsheet that has the following columns: - Theme - Risk - Preventative measures - Mitigating actions

A few minutes later, I had this:

As Ethan Mollick says in his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, it’s worth experimenting with AI in almost every corner of your life. Being able to outsource boring stuff, and using it as a thought partner for things you may have missed can be transformative.

For example, I asked a follow-up question as part of this conversation for things that we might have missed. It surfaced things around cultural (mis)understanding, data security, and policy changes, among other things.

At the moment, the main point of friction for me, whichever LLM I seem to use, is that it forgets context. Sometimes, that can be even within the same chat — and even sometimes when I’ve created a custom GPT. I haven’t used Amazon Titan, nor have I done much with Google Gemini, so I should explore those further.

Ideally, what I’d like is for an AI assistant to conversationally implement workflows that we’ve agreed upon in kick-off meetings. That may also involve my AI assistant talking to a client’s one for scheduling, updates on progress, etc. I think it would be a huge improvement to the hodge-podge of systems involved in multi-organisation projects.

Exporting blog posts to JSON for easier use with LLMs such as ChatGPT

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I’m currently working on the End of Module Assessment (EMA) for my MSc in Systems Thinking which involves pulling together a lot of learning over the past few months. I’ve captured a lot of it here, in this category of my blog.

What I want to do is to query a Large Language Model (LLM) such as GPT-4. However, referring to external URLs in ChatGPT is not always straightforward, and copy/pasting each post individually is tedious.

Adam Procter gave me the idea of exporting the posts to a file format called JSON, and then uploading that into GPT-4 for ease of referencing. So, given I’m not a programmer, I enlisted the help of ChatGPT to create a very small and simple WordPress plugin.

The above video shows how it works, but after activating the plugin, you can export all posts, or just those in a particular category. The downloaded JSON file can be used anywhere, with LLMs online or offline.

You can download v0.2 of the plugin here.

I’ve already found it useful to help pull in ideas that I wrote about a few months ago that I forgot might be relevant to a particular question I’m answering as part of my EMA. If it’s useful to you in its current form, then great! Just don’t bug me for updates. 😉

Tinkering with WordPress category archive pages

Posted on by Doug Belshaw
Screenshot of MSc Systems Thinking category archive page.

Through a combination of trial-and-error, latent knowledge built up from using WordPress for over 15 years, and ChatGPT, I’ve found a way of generating more visitor-friendly archive pages for each of my blog post categories.

The reason I’m thinking about this at the moment is because I’m publishing a lot relating to my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice, and am linking to the category archive at the top of each post.

I’ll not go into too much detail, but I wanted to replicate the style of my main archives page which is generated using the Simple Yearly Archive plugin. I duplicated archive.php in my themes folder, renamed it category.php and then tinkered around with it. ChatGPT was excellent at giving me the code I needed to do the things I wanted, including for the category RSS feed.

I then looked my Open Badges category archives page to ensure everything was working, and noticed that at some time in the past I’d added some code to change the background colour. After taking a while to figure out how I’d done that, I discovered that it’s super-easy to do by going to ‘Appearance’ then ‘Customise’ in the admin dashboard, then adding ‘Additional CSS’.

Here’s what I used to change the background colour of the MSc Systems Thinking category: 

body.category-msc-systems-thinking { 
background-color:#DFEEED;
color:#333;
}
.category-msc-systems-thinking .site { 
background:#DFEEED; 
}
.category-msc-systems-thinking a { 
color:#333; 
}

To improve this further, I’d organise the category page by tag as well as date. But that’s quite enough for this morning. I’ve got some proper work to do!

css.php