I've been working hard for the past few months on YourBOT. I have blogged about it from time to time, but now the actual product is finished, it's being tested in the wild, and I'm onto creating the website and sign-up process. I couldn't have done it without ChatGPT as my code buddy ...
How I built your bot, Piece by piece, side by side, My creation lives
Well ... I could have done it without ChatGPT, but it would have taken me 10 times longer, and it would have turned out to be a very basic product from what we have now. Why? Because I treat ChatGPT as my 'code buddy' and we worked together as a team to build YourBOT.
ChatGPT knows ASP Classic, SQL Server, and JavaScript inside out!
Yes, you heard me, ASP Classic. "Oh, but Steffi, that's such an old coding language!" I hear you proclaim. Yes, it is, but it isn't going anywhere soon, as it's built into so many corporate black boxes that I can't see Microsoft ever removing it from their IIS Server platform.
Yes folks, I've been coding since dial-up was cool and servers were clunky floor-standing boxes with a single 80386 processor, 4Mb of RAM, 100Mb hard drives and running NT 3.5.1. They still had 3.5" floppy disc drives back then, too!
Anyway, 32 years later ... I wrote sBlogBot as a chatbot to go with my sBlogIt! platform for answering questions about my bloggers' posts and, eventually, their websites, too. But sBlogIt! is a focused platform that lacks mass-market appeal. So I wondered over the summer, "Can I commercialise sBlogBot and turn it into something anyone can use?". So I had a conversation with ChatGPT and, after a lot of back-and-forth, we put together a roadmap and got to coding.
I'm brilliant at ASP, but not JavaScript. That's where ChatGPT stepped in!
So when it came to the chatbot itself, I didn't actually start coding it until I had built much of the basic framework for the user dashboards. I knew I wanted FAQs, URLs and RSS feed items, but I needed the SQL tables and supporting pages in there first so we had a data source to plug into the bots.
Then ChatGPT got to work, creating a basic version of the JavaScript bot front end, and I plugged it into the database. And that's how we'd work together. It would write or modify a script; I'd make it work with the SQL database via ASP, then we'd have a back-and-forth about what's working, what isn't, and what changes we need to move it to the next step.
And during our conversations, ChatGPT would suggest a potential new feature; I'd add it to my to-do list, mull it over, and then we'd come back to it later to discuss implementing it. I have a 'don't be a sycophant' rule with ChatGPT, so if it thought I was wrong, then it would tell me. Some ideas I had didn't make it; some we came up with did right away; and others were twisted into something completely new and implemented differently.
It's been a good experience, but not an easy one!
ChatGPT tends to get stuck in a doom loop while trying to resolve an issue. It will suggest one way to fix something (and give me the code to do it), then that wouldn't work, so the options became more limited and eventually we'd loop back around to the original non-working solution, with ChatGPT convinced it was going to work the second or third time we tried it.
There were many times when CTRL+Z was valuable for rolling back code changes that didn't do anything (or even made things worse). Then we would come up with a different way to look at the issue and take an 'out of the box' approach. It worked very well, but I got very frustrated with ChatGPT - and myself - on many occasions.
We actually had a running joke that, when it thought I was getting stressed out, it would tell me to put the kettle on and walk away from the computer for a while. I did that often during this coding process.
One thing that's bugged me about this whole process is the need to copy and paste code back and forth between ChatGPT and my code editor over and over again. I want a code editor that has an AI window on one side and code on the other.
And we'd just talk and I'd write code and ChatGPT would make changes, or it would flag up when I did something wrong, or I'd ask it to mod something and it would just do it. I'm sure there are code editors out there that will do that, but I bet they don't support ASP Classic.
So what's next?
Well, I'm currently working on the YourBot website, and that's nearly finished too. I've been using ChatGPT as a marketing consultant and creating various stacked cards, then copying and pasting an image of what I made into the chat window and asking what it thinks. Different hat, same excellent results, so again, the process has been much faster and resulted in a far better website than I could have done on my own.
I still need to create the public signup process, but that's not a big deal. I've got a couple of YourBOT presentations next week, so I want to have it all done and dusted so people who like what they see can sign up for 'early access'. Right now, it's invitiation only as I need to set them up manually, but the feedback from my beta testers is positive and they've already subscribed a couple of chatbots for use with their own client's websites.
Then it's onto marketing, and that's a different kettle of fish completely, as I now have three products and am building the SaaSy Coder brand for the new year to market all three together. I'll obviously blog about that when I can.
For now, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Nearly there, nearly ready to go. Brand-new SaaS product, from idea to publicly available in 3 months. Like I said, YourBOT was created 10 times faster and is 100 times better than what I could have done on my own.
Give me that AI integrated code editor (Expression Web with a ChatGPT window please) and I'll be the happiest coder in the world. Maybe I should just go Google it and see if something like that already exists?
Maybe I should just write it myself.
Love, light & logic ...
STEFFI LEWIS Independent UK SaaS Developer - Creator of YourPCM & sBlogIt!
Would you like to know more?
If anything I've written in my blog post resonates with you and you'd like to discover more of my thoughts about how i built YourBOT with ChatGPT as my code buddy, then do feel free to connect with me on Linkedin as I love to meet like-minded individuals with similar passions to my own.
Based in the charming village of Hanslope in Buckinghamshire, UK, I bring over 30 years of experience in web development. From creating my first website for the Open University in 1993, through being part of the dot com boom, to my explorations in SaaS and AI over the last few years, my journey has been a rich tapestry of web projects, big and small, both funded and bootstrapped.
Originally developed during the pandemic, at the start of 2025, I released the next iteration of YourPCM, version 2, which is all about 'Easy Contact Management for Small Business Owners'. Is it a CRM? Yes, but I don't call it that because people glaze over at the mention of such things. CRMs are boring, difficult to get to grips with, and it's a nightmare to get help when you need it.
YourPCM is none of those things! It's simple to use, well-supported, feature rich and beautiful, right out of the box. It's available on a simple monthly subscription with no long-term tie-in. Book a demo or grab your own 14-working-day free trial and discover why YourPCM is all about easy contact management for small business owners.
My head is in the cloud, my heart belongs to the web, and my soul is filled with such beautiful code 💗
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