As an experienced developer, ChatGPT (and GitHub Copilot) save me an enormous amount of “figuring things out” time, which not only makes me more productive but also lowers my bar for when a project is worth investing time in. This encourages me to build all sorts of weird and interesting little things that I wouldnt have invested the time in before. One such mini-project involved building a system to archive ChatGPT messages. By prompting ChatGPT, Simon Willison was able to come up with a new JavaScript fetch() function that intercepts calls made by other existing code and saves the JSON data thats retrieved in a window.fetchedData object. This allowed Simon to run some JavaScript on the ChatGPT site that grabbed that JSON data and sent it off to his own server, giving him his own archive of conversations with ChatGPT.
