October 2024

My ultimate goal is to learn how to hit an API from a custom GPT so that I can ultimately order my own groceries from instacart with a custom GPT built for our family. We want to tell a custom GPT our likes and preferences and build it's knowledge over time of the things we like to eat and the recipes we like and the stores we shop at through instacart. Because then we want to feed it more and more complex diet goals that we're trying to hit and have it solve the ways to hit the protein levels that we want to hit as a family. And after it creates the meal plan and grocery list we don't want to have to copy paste and manually filter instacart to find each item. We want the software to find the product code of each item and just make it show up at our house.

Currently I'm waiting on API access from instacart, filled out the application on Monday October 7, 2024.

For testing I am learning how to hit the cat facts free api from a custom gpt. I wanted to use the dominos one but kept hitting the error "Error retrieving pizza items: PRODUCT NOT FOUND: 5199 CouponPizza"

I'm focusing on Python as my first language. I'm using a free account on Replit for testing and iteration. I'm then pushing the code to github for storage and deploying on Heroku which I think will be free. If Heroku ends up not being free then I'm going to upgrade Replit and just do it all there.

So far the paid tools are $20/mo for chatGPT and $0.01/hr for Heroku.

Visit https://cat-facts-api-3820918c389a.herokuapp.com/catfact to see the public endpoint.

Visit https://chatgpt.com/g/g-CZl3NDsoz-cat-fact-gpt to see the custom GPT.

January 2025

Picked this back up, carving out more time on weekend mornings with two goals in mind. Want to improve understanding of basic system design and API integration. Want to have intermediate/basic understanding of how AI landscape is changing.

Went through a bunch of swirl with ChatGPT returning conflicting answers over and over again on if the ChatGPT GUI interface can communicate directly with an API/Webhook. It can do this as evidenced by this project but it often returns answers saying that it can't and I don't understand why it does that.

Somehow I think it's answer is coming back to a frontend vs backend thing which is exactly why I'm trying to level up on understanding basic system design. I don't want to jump into frontend development yet, I want chatgpt to be the frontend to the "AI assistant based on my specific data", I want to say "tell me a cat fact" and have it go grab the fact from where I tell it to, I want to say "tell me about my day" and have it look at my calendar. I want to tell it "order me a pizza" and have it use my local dominos. I want to tell it "order my groceries" and have it build my instacart basket and checkout with my payment method and send to my house.

Turned back on Heroku billing and editing a setting reenabling Cat Fact GPT to talk to the web and this is working. Sending the command to the GPT hits the public API endpoint and returns a cat fact.