Why even bother with GPT plugins
It started with a simple goal: summarize a bunch of PDFs and dump the key points into Notion. You’d think that asking ChatGPT for that would be straightforward, right? But vanilla ChatGPT just stares at you like “cute PDF, now paste its contents here one page at a time.” So I went plugin shopping.
At first, I grabbed every plugin that promised “research” or “summarization,” like a kid grabbing free pens at a conference. And just like those pens, most were clunky and stopped working halfway through 😞
Even just enabling plugins is its own side quest. You have to go to Settings → Beta Features (which sometimes is just called “Settings” with no toggle visible until you reload, cool cool) → turn plugins on, and THEN pray they show up in the plugins store. Sometimes they don’t until you restart ChatGPT. It’s a real faith-based system.
Once enabled, you can only run three plugins at a time. So now it feels like picking a Pokémon team. And some plugins silently fail to do anything — they say they’ve responded, but there’s no output, no error. NOTHING. You’re left wondering whether you’ve made a typo or if the plugin dev just rage-quit mid-commit.
So eventually, I found a weird workflow that kinda worked — but only with three plugins on at once, memorizing which ones clash like seated family members at Thanksgiving.
AskYourPDF is still the MVP for documents
If there’s one plugin I end up going back to constantly, it’s AskYourPDF. The name’s not flashy but it actually does what it says — you upload a PDF, it indexes it, and then you can ask questions.
But beware: It won’t work right away in the chat. After installing it, you need to upload your PDF to their dashboard (not ChatGPT directly), get a file ID, then come back to ChatGPT and paste that ID with your question. Not obvious. Took me several tries and a little crying in the Discord.
It gives decent answers like:
“Based on section 4.2.1 on page 17, the author argues that the 2008 crisis was uniquely predictable due to regulatory rollbacks.”
That’s gold — if you’re trying to write summaries, compare reports, or pull citations. But it has limits: charts or image-based PDFs are functionally invisible. It’s confused by multi-column layouts and skips footnotes entirely.
Also: occasionally it just refuses to find a file ID even when you copy-pasted it perfectly. In those cases, I closed Chrome and came back an hour later. Worked fine then. No explanation. Classic.
WebReader works but breaks your patience
WebReader was the answer to “can I stop copy-pasting long blogs into ChatGPT?” and mostly, yes — if you’re okay with a little chaos. You just paste in a URL and ask it questions about the content.
Half the time it works beautifully. “What arguments does the author make against carbon credits?” → five key points, all accurate.
The other half? It reads the comments section instead. Not kidding. I asked it to summarize a news article and it pulled quotes from Reddit users embedded at the bottom 😂
It also gets confused by paywalls or heavy JavaScript. If a site dynamically loads text, WebReader might just say “No content found.” In one case, it read the cookie banner and nothing else. Tasty.
Still, when it works, it’s fast. I once pulled insights from three strategy reports in 15 minutes during a client call. That used to take me a whole afternoon (plus caffeine and despair). So I keep it installed, but I test every response with ctrl+F through the actual article. I don’t trust it fully — like a toddler holding scissors.
ScholarAI almost impresses then randomly fails
ScholarAI plugs into Semantic Scholar and actually pulls real academic papers into your ChatGPT results.
First use: legit magical.
> “Summarize current research on the effectiveness of habit stacking.”
→ It gave me citations, quoted actual authors, and linked DOIs.
But then it started hallucinating page numbers and made-up studies. I asked for follow-ups and it gave answers referencing studies that didn’t exist (I checked). Bummer 🙃
Also, some days it just doesn’t respond. Your prompt goes in, status says “fetching articles,” then nothing. No error, no log, no trace. Like it went to get milk and never came back.
If you’re using it, cross-check every cite. I have a Notion database now just for fact-checking GPT citations. Made that after I confidently quoted a paper that didn’t exist in a client deck. Rip.
LinkReader tries hard but gets confused easily
LinkReader was supposed to be my shortcut for summarizing web pages AND PDFs AND media. Spoiler: it’s maybe okay at one of those at a time. It’s like the Swiss Army knife where half the tools are missing.
It does OK with normal text-based blog posts. For example, I used it on a Datadog pricing article and it pulled a pretty accurate breakdown. But when I tried it on a product changelog, it thought the table headers were testimonials.
You can paste a raw URL to a file, or a website, but it struggles with gated content or login walls. It returns a result saying “Content not found or inaccessible.” That’s literally all it says. No next steps, no debug help, just vibes.
Also: giant PDFs (over 50-ish pages) make it tap out. You get partial summaries, and sometimes it glosses over entire sections — which you wouldn’t notice unless you’ve read the doc yourself. Turns out trusting AI to read your contracts has some risks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Noteable is slightly cursed but useful for data
I wanted something to auto-explain datasets to me. Noteable connects notebooks to ChatGPT and lets you query sample data tables like you’re talking to a superpowerful Excel person.
You load a CSV (sometimes it works, sometimes not — it gave me an “indexing timeout” when I tried a 10MB file). Once uploaded, you can say things like:
– “Summarize the distribution of customer ages”
– “Show me anomalies in total spend across quarters”
And it spits out responses with sample Python code embedded. That’s very cool… unless you try to run that code and realize you don’t have an actual runtime. You can’t execute anything from within ChatGPT. To do that, you’d need to export the code out and into Noteable’s own platform or some external interpreter.
The messaging there is really unclear — it tells you “Here’s code that does X” but lets you down gently by doing absolutely nothing with it 😅
Also: I got error messages randomly while using it on Friday afternoons. Twice in a row. Coincidence? Probably. Irritating? For sure.
ShowMeDiagrams is almost worth the hassle
As a visual thinker, I hoped ShowMeDiagrams would save me from drawing out workflows by hand during my quarterly review panic-sessions. It does create diagrams on demand, kind of like Mermaid.js but without needing to remember the syntax.
To use it, say something like:
> “Create a flowchart showing how a lead moves from email capture to purchase in an online store.”
And you’ll get something surprisingly legit. Boxes, arrows, even conditional branches.
BUT.
It doesn’t let you edit the diagram once generated. And if it misunderstands a step — like calling Stripe a CRM — you have to re-describe everything in more detail. You can’t just say “change that one part.”
Also: sometimes it switches from flowchart style to sequence diagram randomly, like it’s got multiple personalities. When I asked it to create a site architecture diagram, it output a literal org chart. Lovely.
Still, when it’s right, it’s a timesaver. I used it to plan out a data sync between Airtable and BigQuery, and it caught that I forgot to account for Failed Sync retries. It earned its slot that day.
The plugin store itself is kind of broken
Just browsing GPT plugins is a pain. There’s no filtering properly — just a search box and some very basic categories like “Productivity” or “Research.” But lots of plugins are mislabeled or repetitive. I found three plugins called “PDF Reader” and none told me what actually made them different.
And the descriptions are often empty or just copy-pasted generic pitches. One quote from an actual plugin description:
> “Harness the power of next-generation AI to develop your future faster!”
…cool, but what’s the plugin do? 🤔
You don’t know until you install it, ask it a question, and hope it responds. More than once I installed five different tools just to drop them 10 minutes later. If that sounds familiar, welcome to plugin roulette.
Plugin limits mean you always compromise
Let me just say this plainly: the three-plugin limit is the single most limiting part of ChatGPT with plugins.
If I want to:
– Analyze a PDF (AskYourPDF)
– Summarize an article (WebReader)
– Fact-check with academic research (ScholarAI)
…that’s already my three.
So if I suddenly want to generate a visual diagram (ShowMeDiagrams)? Gotta disable something. Which often means disabling the one that’s holding your current file IDs. And no, it doesn’t remember them. So you’re starting over.
Also, plugin permissions randomly reset. There were days where plugins that worked fine last week suddenly demanded I reauthorize or got stuck in a login loop. I didn’t change anything. They just… stopped liking me. Like moody cats.
All that said — when you get the setup right, plugins really do unlock new powers in ChatGPT. But it’s like juggling IKEA instructions halfway through building furniture. Every now and then, the entire table collapses and you sit in the pile and think, “was this worth it” 😛