Tinkering with ChatGPT: Gmails to Trello cards
Why ChatGPT?
As a manager, my coding duties have reduced drastically. So, looked everywhere to build or automate something that could impact any close one’s work. Found ChatGPT could be a helper to get some inspiration.
Use case
- Someone close does some grunt work that constraints it to share a Gmail account with other three people
- Work is distributed by emails, each member has to pick their corresponding emails and address them
- Problem: most of the times, someone opens an email that does not matter to its responsibility, and leaves it marked as read; so confusion as to if that email was addressed takes over the place
What’s in the market?
My diagnostic is the group is prone to carelessly leave emails read by any reason; so my solution, after speaking with the affected, is to move the emails to a place where their state is visible and it’s easier to distribute tasks to the responsible ones. The most common tool for transparentizing such type of workspace, to me, is Trello or any board-like tool, besides that has a free tier, accessible to many users, and allows to order work in lists.
Did some research prior to get dirty with code, found there’s a Trello add-on for Gmail. However, it ain’t cool enough: asks to open a mail to see the add-on in action, this did not avoid the scenario were oblivious users could skip creating Trello cards for each email read. Besides that did not provide any way to automate card creation. So that was a no-way.
Without further ado, hands on work…
Solution
There, I came up with some requirements:
- tool should create cards automatically based off a emails from an account
- tool should not prompt user for any input once it’s setup
- tool should create cards on a time basis
- tool should integrate with Gmail and Trello
- tool should be a plug-and-play thingy
- cards should be concesive enough and avoid to copy-paste all of the email contents
- cards should not duplicate
From there, the inputs and outputs define as
- inputs: Gmail credentials, Trello integration requirements, user preferences on time basis for these cards to create, target Trello list, target Trello board
- outputs: Trello cards in given Trello list of a Trello board
Caveats
- I already mentioned I don’t code much often, and have got a bit dusty so decided to use ChatGPT for this journey
- Trello has its capricious way to integrate with custom tools, so that adds a bit of overhead to the final solution
Talk is cheap, show me the code:
Below is the link to the Github repo, where I include prompts used with ChatGPT in prompts.txt
Next steps
See if this can become a Google add-on so that setup overhead reduces
Final words
Surprised about how good of a work starter ChatGPT can be, no doubt it still needs polishing and human intervention for its proposed solutions to work. Personally, I come from another profession menaced by AI: translator; where there’s a saying “machine translation will replace translators that translate like machines”. I think of ChatGPT the same way, machine-generated software will replace software developers that write software as machines.
