"i only speak liquid": SPECIAL ChatGPT edition 🧞‍♂️

Hey all 👋!

Welcome to 'i_only_speak_liquid' by Storetasker, where active Shopify developers share learnings they face daily.

This is a one-off special edition!! It is ENTIRELY written by Chat GPT (except this mini-intro obvs, trust me I'm a real human). Great idea & initiative by one of our experts: Ben.

Join Storetasker as a freelance developer to get great leads here.

What I’ve been thinking about: (*written by Chat GPT)

As business owners, we are constantly faced with choices that can impact the success of our company. It's easy to rely on gut feel when making decisions, but to ensure accuracy, it's crucial to base our choices on data. This means tracking the key metrics that are important to our business.

For example, I identified the five most important areas for my business and began tracking them: leads, conversion rate, average project price, total time spent on a project, and repeat client percentage. This gave me a clear view of how my business was performing.

At first, tracking these metrics may seem excessive, but in the long run, it can greatly benefit our business and becomes even more important as our team grows. By making data-driven decisions, we can increase the chances of success for our business.

3 links you can’t miss: (*written by Chat GPT)

• The Shopify changelog is a valuable resource for keeping up to date with the latest changes to the platform. As Shopify continues to evolve and expand, it can be difficult to stay on top of all the latest updates, especially with regard to its API. It's not a new site but it remains one of the most useful resources for Shopify developers.

• Shopify CLI is a powerful tool for working with Shopify themes (and apps). It allows you to work in your own editor and easily connect to version control, streamlining your development workflow and making it easier to manage your Shopify themes.

• GitHub Co-Pilot is an AI paired programer, to help developers write code faster and more accurately. At present, you can thinks of it as an advanced auto-complete function, although it does have the ability to generate entire functions. At $10 per month, if it saves you just five minutes over the course of a month, its paid for itself, A valuable tool for any developer looking to improve their productivity.

One app I like: (*written by Chat GPT)

Mechanic

Mechanic is an automation tool that offers advanced capabilities beyond what is possible in Shopify Flow. Mechanic provides a large library of existing “tasks” that can be easily implemented to automate various processes in a clients store. Additionally, you can write your own custom "tasks" using liquid and the Shopify API, giving even more flexibility and control.

One of the key benefits of Mechanic is its cost effectiveness. It offers a powerful set of features at a fraction of the cost of building a custom app, making it an attractive option for merchants, and developers looking to streamline their clients workflows.

One learning as a freelancer: (*written by Chat GPT)

As AI tools continue to advance at a rapid pace, there is a growing concern among some developers about whether or not these tools will replace us.

Tools like GitHub Co-Pilot and Chat GPT are able to learn from large amounts of data, much more than a human developer would ever be able to use. For example, given the prompt "write shopify liquid code that can be used to enable gift wrapping in the cart," Chat GPT was able to generate the following result:

As you can see, the results of AI code generation are impressive. But should developers be worried? In my opinion, not yet. While AI platforms are advanced, they can only generate specific snippets of code. They cannot yet understand an entire system. It remains to be seen how this will change in the future.

For now, we can use these tools to streamline our processes and become more efficient. How often do we search for the same code snippets repeatedly? With AI code generation, we no longer have to spend time on Stack Overflow looking for answers. We can just write a quick comment and have the code generated for us, greatly increasing productivity.

Of course, small tweaks will still be needed, but making these tweaks is still easier than writing the entire block of code from scratch. In this way, AI code generation can help us work more efficiently and effectively.

In the end, AI is going to continue to advance regardless of our concerns. We can either worry about the potential of being replaced, or we can work out how we can use AI to our advantage.

Personally, I'm choosing the latter and will be using these new tools to help me be more productive and deliver better results for my clients.

And if you're still not convinced that these tools can make you more productive, just consider this: this entire newsletter was written by AI ( Chat GPT ).

- Chat GPT