Drafts Reference GPT

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I’m experimenting with tuning a custom GPT in ChatGPT designed to be helpful at assisting with Drafts questions, particularly in action creation.

It’s a work in progress, but should be more accurate than asking similar questions of one of the default ChatGPT models, as it heavily weights the official documentation and directory examples, and is less likely to suggest things like JavaScript functions that are not available in non-browser JS implementation, etc.

Interested in feedback if anyone tries it out, especially if it leads you astray or gives bad examples so I can further tune it.

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Ooh I will probably use this. ChatGPT has already taken some “Hm this action is going to need some JavaScript and I don’t want to type that on my phone right now” moments and given me something I can use. It managed to retain some Drafts specifics from its training on the web I presume, without doing a search in the chat. It did hallucinate a little though and forget it wasn’t Node. I’ll tell ChatGPT to remind me to try this instead next time I ask it for help with an Action!

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So, I have tried this out, and it has worked very well for me.

I’m not a programmer, and I know next to nothing about coding, JavaScript, etc.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to create or help me modify a couple of actions, mostly to good effect.

In this particular instance, I used ChatGPT to create a new action that exports notes from Drafts to an OPML file, which can then be opened in MindNode, the mind-mapping app.

The action allows me to select notes by tag(s); it reformats the title to ensure each note follows a consistent hierarchical numbering system (think Luhmann-style Zettelkasten numbering). The OPML file is saved to a bookmarked location.

In total, it took me several long days spread over several weeks to get a working version. ChatGPT seemed to regularly “forget” some of the fundamental requirements for JavaScript actions in Drafts, but I got there (and I guess learnt a thing or two in the process). I eventually had an action which worked as expected, but for various reasons, the performance was slow.

When I found out about Drafts GPT, I uploaded the action and asked the bot to debug the script and suggest ways in which it could be improved and optimised. It came back with various suggestions, all of which I accepted.

I added this revised version to Drafts. Execution time is vastly improved, and the output is just as expected.

Drafts GPT also suggested further possible improvements, e.g., allowing the user to specify the output file name and location. At some point, I may experiment to see if it can code the reverse journey—exporting changes made to individual nodes back to Drafts.

I’d be happy to share the javascript as it stands, with the provisos that a) I’m not claiming any credit for the script itself, and b) I would not be able to answer any questions about how it works!

Edited to add: and of course, a huge thank you to @agiletortoise for making this tool available, and also for Drafts itself - it’s become an essential part of my daily workflow.

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That’s good to hear. I will work on tweaking this some, but that sounds like it accomplishing it’s goal.

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I tried this and while it got me 99% there, I’ll mention the hiccups for your reference. The prompt was to write a Drafts script that prompted for a start date and end date and an amount, and then make a new draft with a Markdown table that shows the amount distributed among the days (so, start date 5/21, end date 5/23, nine items, and it should give a table showing three items per day).

  • First problem was it used addTextField for all the prompt items. I asked it to define addDatePicker and it did, and then the LLM intuited that I wanted addDatePicker instead for the date prompts.
  • Additionally it tried to do draft.setText for the final output. I don’t have to tell you this, but setText is a function of editor, not of draft. I told it draft.setText was undefined, and then it knew to replace with draft.content = table and draft.update() on its own.
  • Next problem was it coded the date picker as p.addDatePicker("start", "Start Date", "date", new Date()); and I was getting date and time prompts when I only wanted date prompts. I could see the script didn’t have the options dictionary in the function so I added that and it still didn’t work, and then I noticed that there was an errant "date" in there — so it seems like the LLM kind of knew it needed {"mode": "date"} but couldn’t quite formulate it. I fixed that manually.
  • Finally, there was something happening in the script where it wouldn’t account for the end date, so 5/21-5/23 would result in five for 5/21 and four for 5/22. I pointed that out and first the LLM said everything was OK as is, and then when I pushed a little more it gave a revision that worked correctly.

I have previously had luck just asking ChatGPT in general for help with Drafts scripts and the output has been pretty good, so I tried the whole thing again using general ChatGPT and not the Drafts Helper. I don’t know if it benefitted from my previous query to the Helper, but general ChatGPT returned a script that used addDatePicker straightaway and didn’t have the problem of excluding the end date. But, while addDatePicker was functionally right, it omitted any options and the prompt asked for date and time; when I asked ChatGPT to switch to just date, it applied {"mode": "date"} correctly.

So, allowing for the LLM to have “learned” from my first query, I seem to have gotten better results from general ChatGPT than from the Drafts Helper.

Happy to share the full LLM conversation by DM or anything else you might need. Thanks!

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