"It's just a fetch call, bro." — Every junior dev, moments before learning a hard lesson. So you want to build a ChatGPT wrapper. Fair enough. It sounds embarrassingly simple — you've got an API key, a text box, and ambition. How hard can it be? Turns out: pretty hard. Not rocket science hard, but "oh god why is my chat broken on refresh" hard. Let's walk through the three stages of enlightenment. 🟢 Stage 1: The Junior Dev Move "Ship it. It works on my machine." The junior dev opens a blank React project, installs axios (or doesn't, and just uses fetch ), and writes something like this: Frontend: const res = await fetch ( ' /api/chat ' , { method : ' POST ' , body : JSON . stringify ({ msg : input }) }); const { result } = await res . json (); setReply ( result ); Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Backend: app . post ( ' /api/chat ' , async ( req , res ) => { const result = await ai . chat ( req . body . msg ); res . json ({ result }); }); Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Done.…