The top ChatGPT plugins for developers
From plugins that let you run code inside of ChatGPT to search GitHub for helpful code snippets, here's some tools to supercharge your ChatGPT use.
Jun 4, 2023 • 3 Minute Read
One of the cool new features of ChatGPT is you can now install plugins to make the chatbot even smarter. But here’s the problem: there’s over 80 plugins to choose from in the ChatGPT store, so it can be tricky to choose which ones to install. On top of that, you can only run three plugins at once, so you’ve got to be choosy.
To help you out, we’ve tested out the hottest plugins on the marketplace and made a list of the ones that, in our opinion, would be the most useful for developers. Remember that you’ll first need to set up the plugin beta feature before you can access the store or these plugins.
1. ChatWithGit
A relative newcomer on the ChatGPT store, ChatWithGit allows you to search GitHub with ChatGPT to find code that can help you out. It provides a snippet of the code and a link to the actual repository. Needless to say, this is a big time saver when you’re trying not to reinvent the wheel.
It reminds me of the classic joke between developers where one says to the other, "Hey, I stole your code." And the second developer responds with a casual, "No worries, it's not my code anyway." Or in the case of GitHub, “Awesome, thanks for the fork.”
Want to learn how to use ChatGPT to write code?
2. Code Interpreter
While this plugin is in closed alpha, it makes the list because it’s a very exciting addition to the plugin library. This plugin makes it possible to run Python code within a chat with ChatGPT, with the option to upload and download files, adjust the code, or have ChatGPT make changes and suggestions.
People are already using it to collate big collections of data. One user uploaded a CSV of every lighthouse location in the US and got it to create a gif of a map of all these locations, all with a single prompt. Ethan Mollick at OneUsefulThing used it to create a bunch of programs that showed off its chops as a potential data analyst. In his words, it’s “starting to get strange.”
According to OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, this Python interpreter is in a “sandboxed, firewalled execution environment, along with some ephemeral disk space.” But many people consider this to be the most exciting plugin ChatGPT currently has on the board.
3. Zapier
Surprise, surprise: Zapier, the king of integration tools, has a plugin for allowing you to integrate 5,000+ apps (like Google Sheets, Gmail, and Slack) with ChatGPT. Prepare to spend a lot of tokens! Rather than switch consoles, you can call Zapier directly within ChatGPT’s interface. It supports any of Zapier’s 50,000 actions (e.g. Search, update, write) to any of Zapier’s supported apps.
Now, while this is supremely cool on one hand in terms of automation, it’s also a little bit scary on the other. This could give ChatGPT a lot of access to potentially sensitive data, data that can be leaked. For instance, ChatGPT experienced a rather large data breach just this year, sharing the details of 1.2% of ChatGPT Plus subscribers, including their prompts. If this was business sensitive data about your clients, what would be the consequences.
These concerns aside, Zapier is listed as one of ChatGPT’s most popular plugins right now, and it’s hard to deny how useful a tool like this might be.
Want to perform a security review of an AI model (like ChatGPT?)
4. Prompt Perfect
Coming up with the perfect prompt for ChatGPT can be tough. In fact, entire courses on Prompt Engineering have sprung up almost overnight. Prompt Perfect makes this easier by taking your prompt and rewording it in a way that gets you the results you need. All you need to do is start any prompt with ‘perfect’ followed by your query, and Prompt Perfect will do the rest.
While Prompt Perfect is on the ChatGPT store, it can also be used for other large language models (LLMs) like GPT 4, MidJourney, DALL-E 2, StableLM, and others. We found using Prompt Perfect made life a whole lot easier.
5. Link Reader
Link Reader makes it possible for ChatGPT to read all sorts of links like PDFs, PPTs, Word docs, and more. You can use phrases like “Translate the contents from this link”, “summarize”, “interpret”, or “analyze” to get far more out of examining a link than you could a search engine.
We used it to go over one of our Multicloud reports, and were pleasantly surprised that it nailed most of the topics in the PDF with a simple prompt.
You can see behind the scenes that it’s reading the content directly, so it’s not interpreting it from page or link context (as the GPT 3.5 version of ChatGPT likely would).
6. Wolfram Alpha
The Wolfram plugin helps patch up some of ChatGPT’s problems with math by giving the chatbot access to computation, math, curated knowledge, and real-time data through Wolfram Alpha and the Wolfram language. Here is an example without the plugin installed:
And here’s with the Wolfram plugin installed.
Just a little bit of a difference. The visualization tools are particularly nice, as shown below.
Conclusion: Lots more to come in terms of ChatGPT plugins
ChatGPT is still frontier tech, and things are moving so fast it’s likely this list has become redundant in the time it’s taken you to read it (Sorry!). In the interim, check out this short video for additional ways to use ChatGPT as a developer, or the below resources.
