Learning frontend with ChatGPT as a teacher? Sounds a bit incredible, after all, frontend has a lot to do with UI, and communicating frontend with ChatGPT, which doesn’t have multimodal capabilities, seems difficult just thinking about it. However, recently, with the help of ChatGPT, I quickly wrote a Tampermonkey plugin that can copy the Latex text of mathematical formulas on ChatGPT’s chat interface.

As a backend developer with zero frontend experience, writing a Tampermonkey plugin would first require finding documentation and spending a lot of time just to write a prototype without ChatGPT. If problems were encountered in the middle, one would have to find answers on their own, which could be a very long process and might lead to giving up halfway. But with ChatGPT as a teacher, you can directly ask questions when encountering problems, making the entire development experience so much better.

Once again, I marvel at how ChatGPT really greatly expands personal technical capabilities and greatly improves personal problem-solving abilities!

Previously, I encountered a problem in actual business where Protobuf serialized messages caused storage failures. At that time, this issue almost led to a major failure, but I didn’t write an article to properly reflect on it. Recently, I encountered another Protobuf problem, and after writing Investigating the Mysterious Field Loss Problem When Using Protobuf in C++, I was reminded of the previous issue. Here, I’d like to write another article to properly introduce the pitfall I encountered last time.

I encountered a particularly strange problem when using Protobuf, which took a day to investigate before finally discovering the cause. This article records the process of troubleshooting and locating the problem.