Nick Dobos, maker of the #1 programming GPT, on prompt-gramming with AI

Nick Dobos showed me how to ship a website with two words and a single click.

He’s the creator of Grimoire, the #1 custom GPT for programming that has been used for over 1 million chats.

All he gave Grimoire was two words: “coffee website.” Just a minute later, Grimoire built the website and pushed it live to the internet. It was wild.

Grimoire can do a lot more than create websites—it’s a coding assistant with 75+ built-in hotkey commands and sample projects, a guide to learning how to code from scratch, and a tool for programmers to find answers to their questions in real-time.

Before he created Grimoire, Nick was an iOS developer at Twitter. When ChatGPT came out, Nick started experimenting with it—and ended up building Grimoire. Today, he’s at the leading edge of experimenting and building with AI.

I sat down with Nick to explore how people are using Grimoire and what it tells us about the age of programming by prompting. We dive into:

How AI is massively lowering the barriers to code
Why it’s important to solve the “blank canvas problem” that people experience while creating with AI
How AI tools can streamline your creative process
Why Grimoire has an edge over ordinary ChatGPT
The best ways to use Grimoire to code smarter and faster

This is a must-watch for coders, creative people, and anyone curious about how AI is changing the way we interact with computers.

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Timestamps:

Introduction: 00:00:31
How Nick built Grimoire, the top-ranked GPT for programming: 00:05:20
Ship a website with two words and a single click: 00:10:25
How Grimoire is solving the “blank canvas problem” in AI creation: 00:14:57
The coding curriculum that can take you from zero to full programmer: 00:16:30
Why Grimoire has an edge over ordinary ChatGPT: 00:23:29
Nick’s thoughts on building the system prompt for a GPT: 00:34:10
The utility of AI as a new layer on top of existing apps: 00:40:04
How Nick uses a custom GPT to unpack his emotions: 00:43:11
How to use AI to break down tasks—from programming to daily to-do lists: 00:50:35

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Nick Dobos: @NickADobos
Grimoire: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-n7Rs0IK86-grimoire
Nick’s website for his experiments with AI: https://mindgoblinstudios.com/
AI-first code editor Cursor: https://cursor.sh/
Open Interpreter: https://www.openinterpreter.com/
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book: How Emotions Are Made
Demo Hume, the empathetic AI voice: https://demo.hume.ai/

Is Prompting the Future of Coding? - Ep. 20 with Nick Dobos

AI and I