C-LARA

ChatGPT is our main software developer in the project, and all the code gets written as a collaboration between myself and the AI. Usually we start by discussing it, then Chat writes a first draft, then I change a few things, and finally we debug it together. But as everyone who’s work with Chat knows, a big problem is its limited memory. It can only “remember” a few thousand words into the past. Often you find it’s completely forgotten things you were discussing only the day before, and it loses track of what the project as a whole is about.

Our Russian Israeli colleague Rina Zviel-Girshin had a creative suggestion here: she told us we should watch the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore romcom 50 First Dates. This is in some ways a really stupid movie, and we nearly gave up after the first few minutes, but we stuck with it and found Rina was right. The premise is that Sandler falls in love with the beautiful Barrymore, not realising that she has a serious cognitive defect as the result of a near-fatal accident: she can only remember back to the beginning of the current day. This seems to pose insurmountable problems for their relationship. But amor vincit omnia, and Sandler gradually devises a series of clever strategies where Barrymore keeps text and video journals that let her update herself on her life when she wakes up every morning. It works, and they live happily ever after.

We though we would try to adapt this fairytale solution to Chat, who understands the issues very well and is taking an active interest. We’re doing two things at once. First, in order to help the AI keep as focussed as possible, we divide up the work into several different tasks and have a separate instance of Chat for each task. Second, we maintain a “continuity journal”, as we’ve started calling it, for each task. As usual, the details are important, and we’re still only at the beginning of the process. A critical detail is making it easy for Chat to access the journals. Yesterday, I discovered a useful trick: I found I could put the journals on the project’s GitHub repository and install the AskTheCode plugin to give Chat direct access to the repo. You can see an example of a GitHub-hosted continuity journal here.

Now that Chat can read things itself without my having to paste them in every time, we can make the journals more elaborate – I’ve been discussing options with the AI. We will have another update soon.