Projects Design Documents

by

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m using ChatGPT much more frequently in my day-to-day. Because I have many ideas of things I’d like to implement, and not always have time to do so, I sometimes lose track of them, don’t remember the idea or the details etc.

In order to overcome that, I’ve decided to post those idea online, so I can easily track them, add more details, etc.

With ChatGPT, I can go a step further, and have it work on a design document for those ideas. I’ve uploaded 2 of these a couple of days ago:

For “Monthly Analy”, I’ve started with the following prompt:

#fetch https://www.saguiitay.com/march-2025-projects-update/ Can I give you access to my Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and have you generate a similar report for April?

Then added:

Can you write a design document for a small web tool that will automate the whole process for me?
It should use NextJS.

ChatGPT got back with a few questions:

To make sure the design document fits your needs, could you please share a bit more detail on the following?

  1. What specific metrics or data do you want to pull from Google Search Console and Google Analytics? (e.g., impressions, clicks, page views, sessions, bounce rate, conversions, etc.)
  2. What time ranges should it support? (e.g., last full month, custom range, comparison with previous periods)
  3. Do you want the tool to generate a written summary/report in markdown or HTML like your March 2025 blog post?
  4. Should the report include charts or tables?
  5. Should authentication be via OAuth (for personal use) or service account (for server-to-server access)?
  6. Any hosting target or platform in mind? (e.g., Vercel, your own server)

which I answered below. Sidenote: I really like the questions/answers pattern to focus the discussion to my exact needs. I usually instruct ChatGPT to ask me questions one-by-one until it got all the information it needs.

  1. let’s go with the following metrics:
  • Page Views
  • User Engagement Event
  • Google Indexed Pages
  • Total Impressions
  • Ahref DR
  1. Last 30 days
  2. yes
  3. Tables, like in my March 2025 blog post
  4. service accounts. Just add documentation on what I need to do to make it work
  5. Vercel

You can see the resulting design document here.