I made an airplane spotter in 120 seconds using ChatGPT

My son is 18 months old and he loves watching planes in the sky. Every time he heard the sound of a plane engine, he looked up. The moment he spots a plane, he usually points to it excitedly and says something like “Look!” or “Plane!”

Since he loves airplanes so much, and I know their locations are public data, I wanted to write a fun script that would sound an alarm every time a plane flies overhead so we can run out and find it.

In less than two minutes, you have a functional prototype

It was a Sunday afternoon, I changed his diaper, handed him to his mom for a nap, and then opened my laptop at 12:10 p.m. I opened up ChatGPT and asked, “I want to build a tool that will send me a notification when a flight passes above my house. Please help me build this tool with NodeJS.”

Soon, a NodeJS code is returned with the appropriate API calls, distance calculation functionality, and notification system:

I entered the longitude/latitude and executed it, expecting the API call to most likely break, but to my surprise it ran right away and alerted me to a nearby plane.

I looked at the time: 12:12. The whole process took less than two minutes and I had a functional prototype in my head. We are indeed living in a crazy time.

I could have done this myself, found the right API, figured out its response structure, and calculated the distance between each response and my location - which would have taken 30 minutes, but now I’m doing it 30x faster The speed gets the job done.

Then I thought: this is an interesting tool, let’s see if we can use it on other devices. So I asked ChatGPT:

Turn it into a web app where people can enter their location longitude/latitude (or use a browser to geolocate), radius, and start receiving short notice + voice prompts on the page. I want it to be fully front-end and must be an HTML file with no dependencies.

This is what ChatGPT returns:

For a first try, it worked great! It’s ugly, but at least it works.

After 20 minutes of asking it to use modern design standards, coming up with a name, and creating more responsiveness in the page, I ended up with this:

The link to the aircraft spotter is below: Note: If nothing is displayed, there are no flights currently flying over your head, or you can increase the radius. Probably works best on desktop. )

“Job” may no longer be “Job”

Now, I don’t expect many people to care about a tool like this, but I think this is a great example of how technology can make our ideas become reality faster. Advantage today lies less in your ability to perform repetitive tasks and more in your ability to have the creative insight that is the genesis of new and powerful ideas.

ChatGPT is good at execution, but not good at coming up with new ideas. So if you have unique insights and can clearly communicate them to the machine, this will have a huge impact - we are moving from “primitive” repetitive manual labor to something akin to “ethereal” creative labor.

I mean, we’re getting very close to a situation where you envision a completely new idea and you can make it happen in a minute. For example imagine Airbnb and complete the entire frontend and backend in 1 minute. Maybe we can’t do this yet, but I believe it will be achieved soon. Maybe it can even find acquisition channels and start running self-evolving ads, or adjust itself based on conversion rates.

So I got a little curious: I wondered, as our machines get smarter, whether we would end up sitting in front of our computers, trying to figure out the most innovative and clearest questions. Then, in a world where most “work” can be performed instantly, work is no longer work but the clarity of mind required to type in the right questions—and that’s the realm of the mind. This is really a wonderful era.