ChatGPT Canvas Full Review & Comparison to Claude, Cursor, V0, Replit Agent & Bolt.new

--- type: transcript date: 2024-10-05 youtube_id: PBOPdTRTnRA --- # Transcript: ChatGPT Canvas Full Review & Comparison to Claude, Cursor, V0, Replit Agent & Bolt.new in this video I'm going to do a deep dive on chat GPT with canvas and I'm going to be comparing it with some of the other competitors that people have been comparing it to so cursor Claud v0 bolt. new which just came out as well as repet agent the first thing that I like with the canvas feature is actually its writing abilities I thought I'd be most interested in the coding ability but given that I code day-to-day I don't think that this is going to be the tool that really replaces the daily driver's cursor is probably still going to be the one that I use primarily but for things like writing this is quite great one thing that I really like about this canvas is just the way that it looks and the big notable feature is that you can interact with it you can edit it just like a typical code editor but the thing that I found with it is there definitely are some bugs sometimes I find when I backspace and I go to put the text back I can't actually undo the text that I got rid of sometimes there definitely seems to be some rough edges there but there are some cool features with this I can click ask chat GPT I can say make this longer and really quickly it will just Target that particular area and update with whatever I asked it for the other thing here is there are some helpful shortcuts some of them are a bit fun so you can add emojis here if I just click add emojis and submit that we'll see it will go through the document and it will start to add a bunch of emojis I'd say in terms of design it definitely feels quite nice it's a very simplistic view I'd say it's arguably more simplistic than than probably all of the other options that are out there what's interesting with this and this UI decision might be subtle or intentional but if I hover over this I actually think that it's probably ordered from the options that are most to least used here so suggest edits this is going to be something that is helpful I find on the whole because I'll click this and what it will do for you is you'll start to see notes like you'd see within a comment pane on something like Google Docs or Microsoft Word and instead of having a collaborator like a coworker or a client now it's just chat gpts it's giving you suggestions on maybe different titles you can briefly explain what the paper is why it was so influential and you can take it or leave it you can just click apply if you were to click apply it will just go through and Target that piece of text and add what the suggestion was I think that probably of these different options is the most useful now in terms of the adjust length I think this is another useful one this could definitely be something to speed things up depending on what you're doing here if I just go to longest and we submit that it is a neat UI component that you can just slide it like that if there's a piece that you want to expand on maybe you're writing a script or a blog post or a paper and say if you really want to drill down on a topic it it's able to do that in just a few clicks there now another thing that I think could be useful in say educational context is this reading level button let's just click reading level and let's bring it all the way down to kindergarten and we'll submit that but what's interesting with this is transformers are a pretty complicated subject even for a high schooler they're pretty complicated right here it's making an attempt to describe Transformers as really smart robots it has a lot of analogies here I would imagine if we go through it we have things about encoding decoding Bert gpts RNs rstm this is too hard for a kindergarten maybe if I didn't have something like transform and something more vague or general In fairness it would probably be able to do something like this a little bit better now the final polish button now this definitely could be helpful like instead of using something like spell check and clicking through and and what have you having it just quickly scan the document to make sure that it's more or less intact there aren't any obvious errors like like like you don't have any incoherent sentences or you forgot punctuation or any grammar mistakes and stuff like that then for the Emoji use I don't know like maybe some people use emojis I typically don't use that I don't know if I necessarily find that that helpful in terms of the text option this is where it stands out the options that I'm showing you really are coding related it's not necessarily a fair comparison there are a ton of different GPT powered writing tools that are out there like gen Ai and others a lot of paper writing tools I think this is definitely going to be a competitor to those types of tools next what I want to show you is the coding example I'm going to do a bit more of a comparison to some of the Alternatives that are out there first I'm going to ask make me a snake game in HTML if you were to do this in something like Claude the difference with Claude is as soon as it would render it would render that component so you could see it visually here that's one notable thing that's lacking my theory with this I think they wanted to differentiate themselves a little bit and not just copy what Claude did even though a lot of people were asking for it with that said I'd imagine they'll probably have a UI renderer whether it's before the end of the year or early next year so that visual UI component so cursor doesn't really fit here cuz it is just an IDE but it does work well when you pair it just locally to your web browser but if you do something like make a snake game in HTML if you submit that to Claud it will be a similar type of experience obviously a fair bit of a different UI in terms of How It's displayed but once it's complete you'll actually have it rendered on the screen here and then you can play around with it a lot of people like this especially for UI development frontend development or just novelty things like making these little JavaScript games or what have you this is something that Claude definitely still has a leg up on when compared to chat GPT cuz you could get that code from chat GPT but you'd have to make a file or download it and there's a bunch of extra steps whereas this is just instantaneously there now a similar thing with a v0 if I just say game of snake with v0 is it biases definitely towards react components and more or less modern web development that's why I like it a fair bit because it's something that I find pretty useful and in terms of best practices it does seem like it does quite well with for tail one classes and Shad CI and stuff like that in terms of UI development if you're anywhere from a hobbyist to a professional this is probably going to be one of the more useful options now with that said there is a brand new tool that just came out a couple days ago called bolt. new and this is really one of the more impressive tools if I say start a blog with Astro we can just click one of the examples but you could also type whatever you'd like there now install the project install the dependencies and then as soon as everything's rendered you have a working full web app this isn't just one component that's rendered this is a whole web app and you can even go and deploy it I might do a bit of a deeper dive on this tool in particular I'm still playing around with it I'm still learning with it but in terms of my first impressions this is definitely one of the most impressive full stack web app generators that I've seen out there so you can just click that option here and then your full stack web app is deployed and you can just go and edit it if you'd like say if you wanted to change the code you could change it within here you could go within Source find the page that you want to edit or you could just go and ask with natural language like change out this text to say developers digest that is definitely a tool worth checking out if you're interested now in terms of repet I did a video on repet when it came out and what I found with this tool is it's definitely quite quite opinionated and I found it really biases towards python environments and simple front ends it doesn't do as well on frontend development than a tool like VZ or this new bolt tool from First Impressions It generally simplifies the front end a little bit and when you prompt it it definitely tries to steer you in a particular direction at least when I tried it a few weeks ago it imagine like all of these tools are shipping updates every day I'd imagine all of them are likely going to get better but the other nice with repet is you can deploy it within their platform that's a similarity to something like bolt dot now in terms of chat GPT with canvas you can't deploy it like you can on repet or bolt but right now v0 and Claud don't let you deploy anything I'm just going to try a simple example I'm going to say make a Express server we have our simple server I'm going to do is I'm just going to highlight a piece of text and I'm going to say add in routes so one thing that I noticed with this is it does go through the entire files even if you're selecting a certain portion within the code it's not just going to Target this one piece it's seemingly going through the whole code and my best guess why it's not just streaming out in line is it probably still wants the context of this entire file what gives you arguably a more coherent answer there are similar features here on the right hand side I can click code review here we can submit this and this is something that I quite like let's say you have a piece of code you could very well paste that piece of code in here and just have a bit of a code review I think that is potentially a good case because you could ask an llm like you could paste in a block of text or you could ask something like cursor but there's something about the UI here where it feels very similar to something like a Google doc and it does feel new and novel right it says consider adding middleware like express. Json we can just click apply to that example we see it streaming out there there we go we have our middleware we have our other options here like it's saying potentially add some error handling we can just add that there we go it's going through the whole file again now we have a little bit of error handling the one thing to not with the code review is it seems to find things every single time like you could put in everything and it's going to make suggestions it's almost like having a client that just loves to give feedback even if everything is okay that's just something to be mindful of even though it's giving you suggestions you don't necessarily need to take them it goes without saying another cool thing is you can Port two different languages let's say I want to Port this script to python I can just click the button to convert it to Python and there we go it's a flask app so I can just highlight it and let's say I want to use fast API I'll just type in the word fast API no other directions and there we go that's definitely a handy trick I think where I would use that is if there's a coding language that I don't typically use if I just look at one let's say I click Java here I haven't used Java in years if I were to read through a long piece of java it's nice that I just have the the option where I can just move this to a language where I understand it a bit better if I submit typescript we can see that example of typescript there now there is the ability to fix bugs if you just intentionally add some bugs within your code here let's just do something like that we'll go ahead and try and fix these we made some errors near The Bottom Of Those portions we see that it fixed that and it looks to fix the bottom one as well something that I didn't mention on the document view is you can toggle back and forth with the revisions but one thing about this is if you restore a previous revision like if I do this here I restore this revision you can't go forward anymore that's just something to be mindful of when you do go back and then ultimately restore the revision another helpful thing is you can add logs here if I just submit this we see it's just console logging if you're trying to debug something within your application that's a nice feature but if we compare this to something like cursor cursor is going to do this directly within our editor and we don't need to continually C Cy things back and forth I think this is really the Crux of the issue with this tool but that's an issue arguably that is within Claud b0 basically all of these web-based tools right now and then the last thing you can also add comments to your code as well one thing that I like with chat GPT is you have a number of different things built within it you have all of the different features all of the latest models you're able to generate images and whatnot you're able to have a canvas to edit text documents the ability to edit code one of the big issues with canvas which I think still is an issue with CLA as well as v0 is you have to copy things back and forth from your editor because with cursor you're able to do it where your code already exists whereas this it's more you're just going to be setting up maybe a boiler plate or debug something one of the big issues with this is you're still going to have to copy code whether it's directly within this and then potentially copy code back out into the environment and back and forth there is a fair bit of friction there and I think a tool like cursor really shines in this regard and it doesn't necessarily need to be cursor it could be continue or GitHub co-pilot basically any of those integrated idees now with that being said one big question is whether Chad GPT is going to go after some of these coding tools they do have a desktop app and I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually integrate within directly something like VSS code potentially they're already on the desktop they have these models it wouldn't be surprising to me if say as a part of your chat GPT subscription if you're just able to add an extension where it has similar capabilities to something like continue or GitHub co-pilot I would almost bet that over the next year or 18 months that we'll start to see open AI directly compete within that space for the code editors that's pretty much it for this one I just wanted to do more of a video showing you especially if maybe you were on the fence considering whether to buy a chat gbt Plus subscription hopefully you have a better idea on what it can do can't do some of my opinions on some of the are is but otherwise that's it for this video if you found this video useful please like comment share and subscribe otherwise until the next one