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Show HN: Open a phone number in WhatsApp without saving contact (whatsphone.github.io)

3 points by mayerwin ↗ HN
I made a simple HTML app that can help open a phone number in WhatsApp (web on desktop or app on mobile) without having to create a contact first.

Source code is available on GitHub. Enjoy and share it with your friends and family (they will thank you if they're using WhatsApp)!

I used ChatGPT 4 (even for the favicon) but couldn't say it was faster than writing it from scratch. It was a completely different kind of debugging and improvement process. What was really missing was a way for ChatGPT to automatically see the results of its code and do a few iterations to benefit from a feedback loop. Even just asking it to read its own reply and fix/improve it works wonders, but showing it screenshots is yet another step forward.

3 comments

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fotoflo
Really nice and clean!

I made something a little similar - https://github.com/fotoflo/alfred-whatsapp-linker - this one is an Alfred Workflow (https://alfredapp) that assumes you have a phone number in your clipboard and then opens it in whatsapp. I suppose yours is more elegant.

How long did it take you + GPT to create it?

mayerwin
Nice tool as well. The whole process took about 3 hours. Mostly for polishing, including 1 hour to fix an arcane CSS layout issue that ChatGPT wasn't able to help with (it may have been if I had provided it with the whole rendered HTML along with a screenshot). I really feel the LLM needs to have access to the same feedback we have, and be allowed to iterate (as it is very good at evaluating its results), to be effective with code. I also tried Gemini 1.5 Pro and Claude 3 Sonnet and it wasn't better than ChatGPT.
fotoflo
Its coming...

Did you paste images into chatgpt to show it what the layout was looking like?