Writing a Tampermonkey Script with GPT-4 | David Bieber

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2023-03-17 13:30:04

Today I used GPT-4 to implement my first ever Tampermonkey script. It took well under half an hour, which is likely many times faster than it would have taken me alone. I am blown away by GPT-4’s programming capabilities.

It started with a simple feature request for the Hypothesis browser extension. For context, Hypothesis is a tool for taking notes on the web, including on PDFs. I use it to take notes on machine learning pdfs on Arxiv. It’s a great tool, but it has a limitation: when browsing my notes, it only shows the ID of the pdf, not the name of the PDF. This makes it hard to find what I’m looking for. So, I made a feature request on GitHub, asking if the developers of hypothesis could make the titles of pages editable. This would allow me to replace the useless IDs with the more useful titles on pdfs whenever I take notes on them.

At first I thought this wasn’t such a helpful suggestion. Writing a Greasemonkey script is time consuming and it wouldn’t be worthwhile for such a small usability improvement. Then I remembered GPT-4. So, I decided to proceed.