OpenAI recently introduced ‘Canvas,’ an advanced interface for working with ChatGPT. According to their official announcement, Canvas goes beyond the simple chat functionality and offers interactive and visual experiences to enhance users’ productivity for coding and writing tasks. Built with GPT-4o, Canvas can now be manually selected in the model picker while in beta.
In this blog, we will see what Canvas offers, how it changes the standard ChatGPT interaction and the standout features that set it apart. Besides, we’ll also provide a few (potentially better) ChatGPT Canvas alternatives.
What is ChatGPT Canvas for coding?
ChatGPT Canvas is an editable workspace that helps users collaborate with ChatGPT more efficiently. Unlike the standard chat interface, which often becomes challenging for complex tasks, Canvas provides a more efficient alternative. It opens in a separate window, which allows users to work side-by-side with ChatGPT without switching between tabs. This structured workspace is designed to streamline writing and coding, offering tools that support direct editing and clear feedback. Besides, users can manage multiple versions of their projects. This makes it easier for them to track progress and refine their work.
How Is Canvas Different from the Traditional ChatGPT
The traditional ChatGPT interface operates primarily as a chat box where users input prompts and receive responses. While effective for many tasks, it can become tedious when users need to refine ideas or make multiple revisions. Here are some key differences between Canvas and the traditional interface:
- Editable Workspace: Canvas provides a dedicated space for writing or coding projects, allowing users to make changes directly rather than rephrasing prompts repeatedly.
- Inline Feedback: Users can highlight specific sections of text or code and request targeted edits or explanations from ChatGPT.
- Version Control: Canvas allows users to track changes and revert to previous versions easily, enhancing the iterative process of project development.
- Enhanced Collaboration: The new interface mimics a human collaborator, making it easier for users to engage with the AI as they would with a partner on a project.
Key Features of ChatGPT Coding Canvas
Canvas brings in many new features that make it better than the traditional, and rather limited, ChatGPT. Coding often requires multiple revisions, making it difficult to keep track of changes in a regular chat. Canvas simplifies this process by making it easier to monitor and understand the edits ChatGPT makes. The goal is to increase transparency with ongoing improvements to these editing features.
- Direct Editing: Users can edit text or code directly within the Canvas interface. This allows for real-time adjustments based on feedback from ChatGPT.
- Editing Shortcuts: A range of shortcuts enables users to request specific changes quickly. For example, users can ask for suggestions on improving clarity or adjusting the length of their writing.
- Code review: ChatGPT offers real-time suggestions to help enhance your code.
- Log insertion: Automatically adds print statements to assist with debugging and code comprehension.
- Commenting: Inserts comments into the code, improving readability and clarity.
- Bug fixing: Identifies and corrects errors in your code by rewriting faulty sections.
- Language translation: Converts your code to JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, C++, or PHP.
Test Results for Coding and Writing (GPT-4o with Canvas)
As per OpenAI, the baseline’s performance is highly sensitive to the specific prompt used, potentially leading to different forms of suboptimal results. For coding, OpenAI intentionally biased the model to avoid disrupting power users and refined it based on feedback. Here are the results:
In the second challenge, a key challenge was tuning the model’s editing behavior, balancing targeted edits and full rewrites. OpenAI trained the model to make targeted edits when users select text, with ongoing refinements to improve this behavior.
Training the model to generate high-quality comments required careful iteration and human evaluations, as automated quality measurement is particularly challenging. Unlike other cases, this process needed more manual reviews to ensure accuracy. OpenAI’s integrated canvas model outperforms zero-shot GPT-4o by 30% in accuracy and 16% in quality, demonstrating the value of synthetic training over zero-shot prompting.
ChatGPT Canvas vs Claude Artifacts for Coding
While ChatGPT Canvas represents a fair advancement in OpenAI’s AI-assisted writing and coding tools, it is not the first one to launch a dedicated experience. Claude AI, a direct competitor to ChatGPT, already has a dedicated experience for coding known as Claude Artifacts. Claude offers leading models such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet which are more effective for code generation, and native integration with Github.
Claude artifacts allow you to generate code, create sharable artifacts and ability to remix them
When Does Claude Create an Artifact?
Claude automatically generates an artifact when you are interacting with Claude AI, primarily in the below scenarios:
- Substantial and Self-Contained: Artifacts typically emerge when the content spans more than 15 lines, representing a significant body of information.
- Edit-Worthy and Reusable: If the content is something you’d likely want to refine, iterate on, or repurpose beyond the current conversation, it may become an Artifact.
- Complexity and Independence: Artifacts are created for complex pieces that can stand alone without needing additional context from the conversation.
- Future Reference and Utility: Content that you might want to revisit or utilize later is prime candidate for Artifact creation.
Common Types of Claude Artifacts
Claude’s Artifacts come in various forms, catering to different needs and purposes:
- Interactive React Components: For web developers looking to implement dynamic UI elements.
- Documents: Both Markdown and plain text formats for easy editing and sharing.
- Code Snippets: For developers and programmers to use, modify, or integrate into their projects.
- Websites: Single-page HTML creations for quick web prototypes or demonstrations.
- Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG): High-quality, scalable images for various applications.
- Diagrams and Flowcharts: Visual representations of processes, ideas, or systems.
Claude’s Artifact feature offers a powerful tool for capturing, sharing and preserving valuable AI-generated code.
Practical Coding examples to try with Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs GPT 4o and O1
Below are some practical examples of code generation prompts which you can try with GPT-4o, Claude models. Paste these in ChatGPT Canvas or Claude.
- Python: “Write a Python function that reads a file with names and scores in the format ‘name’ and returns a dictionary of names and scores, along with the highest scorer.”
- JavaScript: “Write a JavaScript function that takes an array of objects representing products (name, price, quantity) and returns the total inventory value.”
- Java: “Create a Java program that calculates and prints the factorial of a number using recursion.”
- C++: “Write a C++ program that reads an integer array, sorts it in ascending order, and removes duplicates.”
Are there other ChatGPT Canvas alternatives?
While Claude artifacts is not a full blown code editor, and lacks features which ChatGPT recently launched, there are alternatives such as Bind AI, GitHub Copilot or Cursor AI. which allow you to get a dedicated AI experience for coding along with your codebase integration. The biggest limitation of ChatGPT canvas is that it lacks access to the leading models such Claude 3.5 Sonnet and native features such as GitHub integration,
Bind AI Code Canvas
Bind AI Code Canvas has editor features similar to ChatGPT’s Canvas, along with access to the most advanced models such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and coding-specific models such as Mistral As an example, here’s how you can create a web application using Bind AI.
- Access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Bind AI Copilot gives you access to the most advanced models such as GPT-4o, (and non-OpenAI models) Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3.1, Codestral..
- Integration with Github Codebase: Users can integrate their GitHub repositories with Bind AI, enabling automatic code generation based on existing codebases.
- Create Custom Agents to execute specific tasks such as front end code generation, or creating python scripts.
The Bottom Line
ChatGPT Canvas introduces a new way to collaborate with AI on writing and coding tasks through its editable workspace, streamlining the process. While alternatives such as Claude Artifacts, Cursor or Bind AI offer similar features, OpenAI’s Canvas sets a new standard for AI-driven creative projects.