Harnessing the Power of AI: Building an AI-Generated Procedural Application

Developing an AI-Generated Encyclopedia while managing Scaling Challenges, Error handling and Cost Reduction Strategies using OpenAI’s API

Photo by Shubham Dhage via Unsplash

Seemingly overnight, AI has become the driving force behind almost every major app. Whether it’s Intercom’s support chatbot, Duolingo’s upcoming chatbot integration, or Zapier’s “connect a chatbot to anything” feature, AI is either already here or on its way. Much like the invention of the calculator, we have a choice: we can either embrace this technology or risk being left behind.

In this article, we will develop an AI-generated Encyclopedia website. We won’t be manually inputting any data; instead, we will rely entirely on AI-generated information created through a procedural approach. As we progress through the article, we will gradually expand our prompt and then address important aspects such as scaling, error handling, and cost reduction. Through this demonstration, we aim to showcase the capabilities of the API and how to overcome its shortcomings when developing a procedurally created application.

Prompting types

The magic behind interfacing with ChatGPT is prompting. While this article won’t delve deeply into the topic of prompting, it’s worth mentioning the three types of OpenAI prompts:

User Prompts: These prompts are the ones provided by the user. In the ChatGPT UI, they would correspond to the questions or input entered by the user.

Assistant Prompts: These prompts refer to the historical responses generated by the AI. In the ChatGPT UI, they represent the previous replies from ChatGPT. The ChatGPT UI displays the contextual chat history by including both the original prompts and all the assistant prompts. It’s important to note that ChatGPT’s ability to remember more than a few contextual messages is limited by token limits, which we will discuss later.

System Prompts: This is where the real magic happens. System prompts enable us to “train” the AI on how to respond to user prompts. While not visible in the ChatGPT UI, system prompts play a crucial role in developing a useful integration because…