Turning ChatGPT into a CODA.io formula expert

Hi all,

earlier today I was stuck with a formula for my Life Dashboard 2.0 doc
I almost started to ask here in the community but then I thought, let’s try ChatGPT.
It solved my problem in the first answer!

Immediately got me thinking to build a GPT-powered coda.io help chat bot…

Here is what I wrote:

Wanted to share it. What do you think?
Did you use ChatGPT while building your doc?

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Hi @Simon_Heuschkel , cool trick!

How did you teached to chatgpt the coda’s formulas??? :)))
Also, it would be awesome to just “copy and paste” into chatgpt the “schema” of the table to have exactly the formula you need without the manual edits :)))

In any case, creative work! :smiley:

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It’s impressed me a lot but I’m afraid it doesn’t have enough training data on coda to create complicated formulas. I’ve found it to be hallucinating a bit. Otherwise it’s great at summarizing what a formula does. I’m sure it’s gonna get better in no-time though, especially with GPT4’s improved logic, amazing potential!

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summarizing what a formula does

The Coda team is developing this feature: ChatGPT + formula comment = auto comment,Clicking “auto comment” button will add a comment at the top of the formula to explain what the formula does.

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Mario, the simple prompt “act as a coda formula expert” did the trick.
Not sure if it understands more complex formular problems but it’s definitely worth a try.

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It’s definitely interesting.

I asked it do something for me and it kept inserting excel formulas that coda doesn’t have. Each time I pointed this out it juts references a different excel formula lol.

Also most of the formulas didn’t actually work. So asking for basics things is cool but it do much of anything that’s complicated.

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Cool! but definitely “limited”!
there should be a way to “teach” ai coda formulas, let’s see if coda take seriously ai implementation and design such a system! :slight_smile:

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I’ve been saved all morning after training a CustomGPT on Coda Formulas and Table Reference Data. It works great!

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This is the key to any understanding by generative AI about a proprietary language such as Coda CFL.

I have written about this for years - LLMs are trained on pervasively available code in Python, Javascript, and C as well as Excel and Sheets formulas. But they have little exposure to formulaic languages such as Airtable, Notion, and Coda. Any reference to these often result in hallucinations generated because of their understanding of Excel.

I must ask the Codans - why would you not fine-tune the same model you use for Coda AI such that it fully understands CFL? Why isn’t that a thing and why isn’t it already in the product?

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I’ve been doing this for almost a year, way before GPTs. It used to work most part of the time; with GPT 3.5, the hallucinations were more present, but nowadays, it gives me the right answers most of the time. I simply asked if he understand the Coda language, and he said yes, so I started raising my questions.

Nowadays I rarely use it, because I was just starting so I had a lot to learn. With time, I’ve gotten the spirit of how to build the formulas, so things got easier.

ChatGPT also helped me to plan my schemas.

I highly recommend it, but be sure that from time to time, ChatGPT will invent such creative new functions!

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Please share the GPT!

Hey!

Super cool!

I’ve been building CodaPackAide (formerly CodaPackGPT) which is loaded up with all the coda pack documentation.

Haven’t asked it formula questions before but in its current configuration it returned the following with the same question as yours…

I’ve been doing this ever since they released the custom GPTs. I created the “Coda Guru” and trained it to read all of the Coda documentation online. Now, all I have to do is tell it exactly what I am trying to do, and it gives me the perfect formula syntax as a code block which I paste directly into the formula. I would say that it works perfectly 99% of the time, but still has trouble with the really advanced stuff.

I would go as far to say that it has increased my productivity setting up Coda docs and tables 100-fold.

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@Justin_McDaniel, Could you share the link to your GPT please? It sounds very useful

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