Convenience Over Perfection: The Competitive Advantage in GenAI Adoption
When I turned 50 back in 2023, I decided it was time to join the gym again. But this time I was determined not to repeat my old cycle: join a gym, get injured, quit soon after, then spend months struggling to cancel the membership.
This time, I picked a coworking space with a gym and a trainer to remove excuses. The trainer gave me a diet plan and a daily 1,800-calorie target—plus homework: log everything I ate for a week. Tracking meals turned out to be a hassle, even when using top apps like MyFitnessPal. In fact, I found the app clunkier than a pen and paper food journal. At the time, ChatGPT just launched custom GPTs with computer vision features, so I started experimenting.
I decided to build my own calorie counter called “QuietDietGTP.” The idea was simple: I wanted something where I could upload a picture of a meal, and it would tell me how many calories I had left against my daily goal of 1,800.
I wrote an initial prompt for the custom GPT. I tested it by uploading several photos of my food plates and checking the results against the actual ingredients.
The results weren’t always perfect, but they were good enough to keep me honest and amused!
Over the next few months, I snapped pictures of every meal, tweaking QuietDietGPT with just plain English to get better results. I even taught it to track macronutrients (e.g., fats, carbs, proteins, and fiber)—no coding necessary.
Six months later, OpenAI upgraded its memory, fixing a bug for me for free. To this day, I still use QuietDietGPT daily—it’s so handy, it stuck.