Lessons learned building ChatGPT Apps (developers.openai.com)

Alpic has shared valuable insights gained from building a suite of ChatGPT Apps, emphasizing a shift towards AI-first interfaces where users interact directly with models instead of traditional UI workflows. Over a three-month period, the team developed two dozen apps for various sectors, including travel and retail. They discovered that building ChatGPT Apps necessitates a different approach compared to conventional applications, particularly in managing context between users, UI, and the model. A crucial lesson was the need to selectively share context—overloading the model with information can lead to inefficiencies and diminish user experience. By establishing clear visibility rules and utilizing new technical strategies, such as the Vite plugin for state management, they enhanced how context is communicated within the apps. The significance of these findings lies in their contribution to the broader AI/ML community, especially as developers transition to building applications that leverage conversational AI. Through the creation of an open-source framework named Skybridge, Alpic aims to facilitate faster development cycles and improve app performance by addressing issues such as context asymmetry, data fetching strategies, and ensuring that the model remains informed during user interactions. With ChatGPT Apps emerging as a fundamentally new environment, these lessons stress the importance of adapting traditional UI paradigms to better align with AI-driven experiences, paving the way for more seamless and effective user engagements.