Unblocking Yourself With... AI? | Customers, Etc.
How do we look at the skill of "unblocking yourself " in the age of AI?
Early in my career, I would use VBA to help automate tasks within spreadsheets. Later on, I would write javascript bookmarklets or bits of Python that ran inside Zapier zaps. Each of these scenarios required that I knew enough about how to code to be able to implement a solution.
Of course, knowing how to code doesn’t mean you have enough information to solve the problem. In 2006, I had a physical copy of VBA Developer’s Handbook, 2nd Edition on my desk. Today, I still make heavy use of Google searches and Stack Overflow when trying to solve a problem, but sometimes I get stuck.
One of the places I get stuck is not in the code itself, but in trying to wrangle the various platforms, frameworks, and APIs I need to employ to solve a particular problem. If the problem is frustrating enough and the payoff is relatively low, I’m likely to just give up.
Fast forward to today. How do ChatGPT and other AI coding tools help us to “unblock ourselves”?
Enter the non-coding coder
This tweet showed up in my timeline last week and really made an impression on me:
I messaged Andrew to get more context and was surprised at how much he was able to level up his skillset just by interacting with ChatGPT when he needed to code. He’s not a coder, but now he can code.
If you had asked me if this was possible a few years ago, I would have said you needed at least a passable knowledge of how to code in order to be able to Google-and-Stack-Overflow your way through a problem. Now I’m not sure so sure that’s true.
Using ChatGPT to quickly unblock yourself
One of my personal TODO list items has been to add the schedule for my church’s Sunday school classes to Google Calendar. The way I’ve done this in the past, I would just do it one at a time, duplicating events and editing the date until I had imported the entire calendar. It was a pain1.
I knew there had to be a way to get Google Sheets to talk to Google Calendar, but I dreaded the thought of spending a few hours Googling how to get one service to talk to the other, trying to remember (because I don’t do it all the time) how to loop through a spreadsheet in code, and then piecing it all together. Mentally, I know each of these steps is possible, I know that I’m capable of doing them, and I even know how I would go about searching for answers. But it’s tedious work.
Enter ChatGPT2. Here’s how I framed the problem:
Help me create a spreadsheet in Google Sheets and write Google Apps Script (GAS) code that accomplishes the following goals:
- The GAS code, when executed, will add rows from the spreadsheet to Google Calendar
- The Spreadsheet needs to have columns for Class Date & Time and Event Name
- There needs to be a way to pick which Google Calendar I'm adding to
My wording wasn’t as clear as it could have been and the response it provided wasn’t perfect—and it’s not really worth sharing because you can try it yourself—but what impressed me was how I was able to ask it questions to further clarify the response I had received and any other questions that had come up.
Here’s one where I wanted to see if it could help me quickly figure out a formula without having to Google it:
I have a Google Sheets column that has just the date in it. I want a formula that takes the date from a cell and adds the time (10:15 AM) to it.
I got stuck because ChatGPT was referring to an older version of the Google Apps Script user interface. All I had to do was point it out. (“Sorry about that confusion. The Google Apps Script UI has seen changes over the years, and it seems you're dealing with a newer interface.”).
For this step, In the Apps Script dashboard, click on Resources > Advanced Google Services., I can't find Resources
I was able to follow the steps pretty deep, but when I was confused by OAuth scopes, again I just told it I was stuck.
I was told I need to add an OAuth consent screen. I've started to set that up but I'm stuck on if I need to add or remove scopes.
By this point, I was running the script, but I wasn’t seeing a pop-up to enter the calendar ID3, so again I just let the script know.
I got stuck at the 4.4 where I'm supposed to enter a calendar ID. It doesn't pop up with a browser input box
I could have definitely Googled this last question, but asking ChatGPT was just easier, giving me step-by-step instructions as an answer.
Where do I find the calendar ID?
The interactive nature of the exchange was what impressed me the most. It wasn’t necessarily about the quality of the entire solution or that everything was perfect. It was that I could keep asking clarifying questions to push forward.
There was one piece of advice that it returned that was particularly helpful:
After you've added the Calendar API from within Apps Script, there's one more step. You need to also enable the API in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project that your script is using.
In the Google Apps Script dashboard, click on the project settings icon (a gear icon on the left sidebar).
Under the "Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Project" section, click on the project link to go to the associated GCP project.
Here, navigate to the "Library" section.
Search for "Google Calendar API" and enable it.
In the past, this is likely where I would have gotten stuck or given up. You mean I have to spin up a GCP project to get this done? Forget it. But ChatGPT just gives me the exact steps I need to complete and I’m immediately unblocked. I don’t have to search for the right answer on Stack Overflow and hope it applies to my context. It’s just there.
To the future
Where do we go from here? In the short term, I welcome the ability to unblock myself more quickly with smart AI tools. There are productivity gains to be had, for sure, but for me I’m enjoying the leverage of getting past stumbling blocks that had previously tripped me up.
I also welcome people being upskilled to solve technical problems that were previously out of reach because of e.g. not being able to code. If ChatGPT enables you to build smarter systems, I’m here for it.
I’m curious about some of the long term challenges. One thing I noticed when I was hacking away with what ChatGPT recommended is that I didn’t care as much about the quality of the code I was writing. I didn’t think as clearly about the overall design of the solution and I was satisfied with just getting to “done”. I think these challenges can probably be overcome with a tweak to how I approach using AI tools, but they’re there nonetheless.
For now, I’m excited to continue unblocking myself with AI.
I’m not sure why, but at the time I didn’t bother to see if this feature already exists. It turns out there’s already a way to import events into Google Calendar via CSV.
I’m using ChatGPT Plus with GPT-4.
Having a pop-up to enter the calendar ID probably isn’t the ideal method, but it worked so I ran with it.