Inspiration
Initially I didn't know what to build, I saw the Devpost plugin, thought that'd be cool, so I decided to start looking into that. I've been working on Olive for a year now, mostly built with Codex, and wanted to see about serving it up inside of ChatGPT. Olive already has it's own agent so this wasn't that far from what already existed but it did require using OAuth 2.1 with Clerk and I had exactly zero knowledge of how that worked.
What it does
Olive does your books, that was already there, but now you can talk to your books inside of tools you already use. For now, that's ChatGPT only and only through dev mode but soon many more apps and I'll submit my app to ChatGPT to be an available plugin.
How we built it
I asked ChatGPT initially what an MCP was, how they worked, and it ultimately lead me to realizing it's more like a server where functions go through. Essentially. And I used that concept, went to Codex, and asked what it took to get Olive on ChatGPT. From there it lead me to Clerk, down the path to lots of bugs, and finally hosted on Vercel where everything is now running correctly.
Challenges we ran into
I had exactly zero knowledge of what OAuth was and barely any knowledge of MCPs, so I learned quickly. I initially built a flip-a-coin MCP to work through some of that ambiguity of a new project, and fortunately, it taught me enough to eventually build Olive MCP.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I am insanely proud that I officially started building this at 2pm and it's now 6:33pm and it works lol. Speed is the name of the game.
What we learned
OAuth is like a revokable sign in between two softwares, Olive has it's own sign in with Firebase and ChatGPT can connect to that through Clerk. I also learned that MCPs let agents be able to interact with external data sources. I believe this is almost certainly the future of AI agents.
What's next for Olive
Continue to improve, get people to use it inside of ChatGPT, and get them to tell me what they don't like (by incentivizing them to be anti-polite) as it turns out, people tend to say something it great when it really isn't, maybe it has something to do with being polite. Regardless, I want to figure out a way to get them to tell me what they hate in a way it feels safe for them. I want to rapidly improve and don't mind my feelers getting a bit burned.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.