ChatGPT Notebooks for VSCode

Welcome to the unofficial ChatGPT engine for VSCode Notebooks!

• Create a .chatgpt file to get started
• Use "Code" cells to enter your prompts.
• The execute cell function will send the conversation up to that point to the OpenAI API.
• You can choose your model in settings (default GPT-4).

UI Suggestions

Many parts of the default notebook UI do not apply to a ChatGPT conversation. The author suggests hiding the notebook toolbar & all cell toolbar buttons besides delete. Increasing the Notebook Output Font Size is also recommended.

Code/Markdown Cell vs Markdown Language

VSCode notebooks have two types of cells: Code and Markdown.

Code cells can be executed (i.e. sent to the API), Markdown cells cannot.

Within a Code cell, any type of language can be selected for syntax highlighting. One of them is Markdown, which this extension uses, so that you can mix text and syntax highlighted code in your prompts.

Things to Avoid

The following operations will lead to undefined or unwanted behavior.

• Run All - It will send a request for every cell. Execute the last cell instead.
• Editing cells besides the last - Breaks the conversation flow.
• Re-ordering cells - Ditto.
• Long-running conversations - Results suffer & requests get larger.

Understanding how the ChatGPT API works

The entire transcript of your conversation is sent to the API on each request. The OpenAI API does not store anything server-side. As your conversations get longer, your requests get larger. Keep this in mind when budgeting your API tokens. Try to create new conversations as frequently as possible - this also helps prevent hallucinations.