Looking through the feature requests category, I can see that most heavy users (I’m going to make the assumption that most folks here are that) are looking for lots of the same things: Folder-based organisation for prompts and custom GPTs. Basic ways to make the outputs more usable in daily workflows.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on building my own CMS simply to store and organise prompt outputs.
Calling it a “knowledge base” might actually be more accurate.
This isn’t a sales pitch. I have no commercial plans for the project. It’s just a CRUD app purpose-built for this job.
I’ve been building it because I find the prompt outputs so often so valuable (hence I want to properly store them, assign tags and categories, etc, etc).
Why did I build it?
Because it wasn’t easy or possible or intuitive to do any of the following on the ChatGPT platform as it exists today.
So in that spirit, here’s everything I added because I couldn’t find it natively:
1: Search through prompt outputs
This is very basic.
And if you’re scaling into the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of outputs (business use-cases but even some “power users” definitely in this category) you’re going to absolutely need some kind of robust search interface with filters (and all the other must-haves).
The sidebar menu is a nice UI touch. But it’s not a substitute for a proper search and retrieval system.
If you can’t search through your prompt outputs, it’s very difficult to see that data as any kind of useful long-term repository, which I believe it can be.
2: Tag outputs, tag custom GPTs
Again, thinking about using GPTs professionally (which I do, extensively) and at scale.
Taxonomies are foundational when working with content and especially important when managing prompt outputs and custom GPTs (or GPT “agents”) which could easily be grouped into discrete bundles for ease of management.
OpenAI could build a whole mini-CMS / “Studio” around the core functionalities offered by the web UI. Give users the ability to save outputs and then edit them all on platform. Then export them to Google Drive / Confluence / wherever makes the most sense.
3: Prompt outputs in rich text and not markdown
Markdown is great (I am writing this post in it!) but not familiar to most non-nerds.
And lots of ChatGPT users are just ordinary folks who just happen to be enamored by this very exciting new technology. Markdown outputs present a big obstacle to this user-base (“what’s this weird formatting? Why can’t I paste it into X?”)
Surely this could be implemented as a simple frontend thing?
Markdown would be a great option but it shouldn’t (IMO) be the default output format.
4: Folders
This comes up frequently here.
Yes, it’s pretty essential.
Custom GPTs are great. But the current UI does not make working with all that easy. Simple folder-based grouping would be a great start.
5: Prompt exports
The main utility I see in GPT outputs (as do many) is for their excellent ability to provide starting points for further research.
In my case, I commonly use ChatGPT to kick off stack research (find me a tool that meets these criteria).
But the output is the beginning of the research journey, not the end of it.
Hence copying outputs somewhere else is quite essential.
I can understand why ChatGPT wants to keep people on-platform, but it would be great if there were some more advanced/rich export options. The ability to export long outputs to PDF in one click, for example, would be excellent.
Backupability
I may be in the minority of folks who worry about backups despite “the cloud”… but I do.
To have full confidence in using ChatGPT in more advanced ways (yes, perhaps a small use case) I need to be able to know that I can retrieve my own data in some way that’s easy to replicate.
A data export self-service option is now very standard (thankfully).
If I could extract my outputs that way I would have a lot more confidence in just using the UI … and wouldn’t be building my own kind of “add on” to it.
That’s it. Most of the things I’d love to see right now to make ChatGPT even better.