ActiveCortex

Easily add AI-generated fields to your Rails models.

ActiveCortex is born out of the need to easily integrate OpenAI into Rails.

Integrating with OpenAI is kind of a pain. It requires a lot of boilerplate: a service object, dealing with OpenAI errors, defining custom functions, etc. Also, OpenAI is constantly releasing new features, and keeping up-to-date is a hassle.

Many developers aren't following OpenAI's best practices because they don't have the time to develop the functionality required to follow them. For example, it's a best practice to split complicated tasks into multiple prompts, but some developers will avoid doing that to simplify their implementation. This results in worse outputs. What if you could effortlessly write multi-stage prompts and debug their performance?

We often write custom functions defining how to create a model we already have a schema for! What if you could tell ChatGPT to provide its response in a format that matches an ActiveRecord class?

Finally, we have to consider errors. OpenAI has downtime, sometimes returns server errors, and ChatGPT sometimes bugs out and returns "Sorry, I can't help you with that". What if you could remove the error handling logic from your system?

ActiveCortex cleans up Rails codebases by providing a macro that deals with the interface to OpenAI. (I'm still working on the above features, but that's the vision for this gem!)

# app/models/document.rb
class Document < ApplicationRecord
  include ActiveCortex::Model

  ai_generated :summary, prompt: -> (doc) { "Summarize: #{doc.text}" }
  # (or)
  ai_generated :summary, prompt: :generate_summary_prompt

  # Generate has_many associations
  has_many :reviews

  # This will look at the Review class and pass its schema to OpenAI.
  ai_generated :reviews,
    prompt: -> (doc) { "Register three reviews for #{doc.title}" },
    max_results: 3

  private

  def generate_summary_prompt
     "Summarize: #{text}"
  end
end

# ... then ...
doc = Document.new(text: "Call me Ishmael...")
doc.generate_summary!
doc.summary # => an AI-generated summary of `text`

doc.generate_reviews!
doc.reviews # => [#<Review id: nil content: "Wonderful! The way...", rating: 5>, ...]

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "active_cortex"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install active_cortex

And set an OpenAI key

# config/initializers/active_cortex.rb
ActiveCortex.config.openai_access_token = ENV.fetch("OPENAI_ACCESS_TOKEN")

Happy for you to open an issue if you have ideas to improve the gem.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.