Meet Stan

"Stush," as my dad calls him.

Stan helps my dad write radio scripts for his clients.

My dad is mostly retired after several decades in the radio industry, but he hung on to a couple clients he loves. Many months ago, I introduced him to chatGPT and we built a little custom GPT to help him write scripts. It's loaded with some instructions—mainly just some pointers on what works well, picked up over the process of writing hundreds of scripts.

A few days ago, my dad called to complain that chatGPT constantly writes scripts that are the wrong length (usually too long). Honoring word limits, especially without an example, isn't something LLMs excel at. I've been building some tools for myself using streamlit for things at work, but I run them all locally. Making him a chatGPT substitute seemed like a fun, low stakes way to figure out what it would take to deploy a streamlit app.

I did the whole thing in Cursor, Github, and Streamlit, and it only took a couple hours to get a rough draft built and online. Streamlit is a breeze to work with, and Cursor works well with an app this simple (I find I need additional scaffolding when my apps get too complicated).

A few things I learned:

• Streamlit has its own way of limiting access (I did not know this and built a login system—necessary because Stan obviously uses LLMs so there are API keys involved here).
• Streamlit also has a lovely and very easy way to handle secrets.
• Streamlit has a bunch of standard patterns for handling UI (I find all my apps end up looking sort of the same). Fighting these is pretty futile. Your app looks like what it looks like.
• Streamlit apps disappear from the internet when they're not being used (my Dad called to ask what was happening—he didn't find "Your app is in the oven" to be a helpful error message).

My dad called this morning to request some new features (keeping a history across sessions and labeling the history by client), and I loved it. My job these days is 95% Enterprise Account Manager and 5% Assistant Finance Manger. It's been such a joy to take a break from sales to build something.