OpenAI has launched an extra facility for developers using ChatGPT. Canvas is described as offering a new way of working with ChatGPT to write and code.

ChatGPT is OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence chatbot that is already popular with developers wanting an intelligent assistant while writing code.

In an announcement about the new tool on the OpenAI website, OpenAI said that while people use ChatGPT every day for help with writing and code, they recognize that while the chat interface is easy to use and works well for many tasks, it's limited when you want to work on projects that require editing and revisions. Canvas offers a new interface for this kind of work.

Canvas opens in a separate window, and is designed to help developers working on a coding project. The current version is an early beta. It was was built with GPT-4o and can be manually selected in the model picker while in beta. This beta version was initially rolled out to ChatGPT Plus and Team users before being available to Enterprise and Edu users. OpenAI plans to make Canvas available to all ChatGPT Free users when it's out of beta.

This release lets you highlight sections of code for ChatGPT to focus on, and Canvas will give inline feedback and suggestions. These will be based on the entire project rather than limited to the code portion you've highlighted. OpenAI says Canvas will help developers track and understand ChatGPT's changes, and there's an undo option if things go wrong.

Coding shortcuts are provided for reviewing code, and for adding logs in the form of print statements to help developers debug and understand their code. You can also use Canvas to add comments to the code. 

Another option will attempt to detect bugs and rewrite the problematic code to fix the errors.

Finally, Canvas will port code to a different language, with options to translate code into JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C++, or PHP.

Canvas is available in beta now for ChatGPT users.

More Information

OpenAI website

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