I made a Discord bot with ChatGPT

Okay, get ready for a spewing of technical terms for something straightforward. The point of this post is how you can do something you never thought possible with ChatGPT. I made a plugin/bot for a social chat room tool called Discord. Think of Discord like Microsoft Teams or Slack, but for the cool club. Discord was initially just for gamers, but content creators and brands have also taken it in as a hub for their communities.

Tangent, did you know before Slack, teams, discord, GroupMe, Viber, WeChat, aim, hangouts, and messenger, there was something called IRC (Internet relay chat). Old-school nerds will know that everything today with chat is just IRC with a lot better interface. And yes, before IRC, you had to chat in the snow uphill, Grandpa.

Anyway, friends and I hang out in discord all day. We have had this chat-based social club since 2009, which was pretty handy during the pandemic. A modern way to think of it is like group text on steroids. We have changed platforms several times, but discord has been the stickiest.  Every time we change, we miss a feature or two.

Okay, backstory over...

The missing feature of Discord is the one-click engagement, like a heart emoji. In Discord's case, it was two clicks.

So when I started challenging myself to do new things this year, I proclaimed I wanted to make a bot that makes one-click engagement possible inside Discord (like what we see above in that groupme image). A couple of days later, I did just that with ChatGPT. Bear in mind my coding experience is minimal. I can read some of it but do not speak it fluently. I can make you a mediocre website from scratch or use a design tool and make a kick-ass one.

Take a breath here. I am about to throw out a bunch of stuff I used in about 2 hours total work time to make this. I will spare you the line-by-line code steps. That is what ChatGPT is for.

Start your engines

I asked ChatGPT to help me make a discord bot that adds an automatic thumbs-up or down emoji to every post. This will make it so members of our server can quickly one-click a reaction.

It spits out some javascript code to copy and run on my computer and set up in the backend of Discord Developer. It kinda worked. I knew I didn't want to use this on my computer long-term, but host it online somewhere, so I didn't need to keep my computer online to make it stay alive.

So I used Amazon Web Services to store the bot/code and run it remotely. I have never used AWS, SSH/Putty to install node.js and connect to the bot, FileZilla to transfer my code onto the server,  and ChatGPT walked me all through it.

This is the point: I touched at least three unfamiliar tools, and ChatGPT walked me through them. I was okay as long as I was patient and could follow instructions.

The Magic

I got stuck so many times. My first instinct was to google the problem, but not with ChatGPT. I just told it that it didn't work, and it gave me options to try. When the suggestion fails, I tell it. ChatGPT comes back with an alternative solution. There were times when I exclaimed, "this isn't working, the experiment failed, ChatGPT can only get me so far," but then I told the bot I was still stuck, and it gave me another solution to try, and voila, it worked!

It worked! I am a developer now! I am an AI whisperer! I am shouting from the rooftops! $500,000 salaries, here I come!

The Reality

What I made sucked. Everything worked, but the result was annoying. Two emojis on every post were ugly. This is where understanding the medium you are working in matters. In Product Management, this would come up early in the concept phase.

Because the emoji/reaction format goes under the post, it added extra spaces between messages, and the thumbs-up emoji looks like Homer Simpson is touching every line of text.

Sometimes we need to build first and ask questions later. That is what was done in this case.

• I built a discord bot with ChatGPT and a bunch of foreign tools
• The bot worked, but it turned out to be a bad idea
• The next bot I build might not suck
• I still feel an immense sense of accomplishment and inspiration from AI

Up Next

AI for development is going to be huge. I'm sure you have seen the memes about high-salary developers using search engines to solve their coding problems or do most of the work for them, and AI will expand on that.

There are already more robust tools launching, like Git Copilot and Copilot X. They will help you write a lot of code and check for errors.

Did you make it this far?

Congratulations, you won!

Some of the hardest things we do only require our attention and patience. Being overwhelmed can be painful, but the sweet satisfaction of completing a project makes it all worth it.  

Thanks for reading