Shakespeare is a UI that makes it easy to use any other AI provider (like z.ai or OpenAI) to build websites. You can connect directly to z.ai or OpenAI as a provider, and use their models directly.
In addition to the base services of these providers:
1. Shakespeare makes it easy to change on the fly between models and providers (ex. if you want to quickly switch out z.ai for GPT for a different task). This is also nice if you want the option to pay with Lightning, in which case you can use the Shakespeare AI provider or Routstr.
2. Shakespeare has a full development environment in it, including the ability to live preview sites and deploy to a working URL. If you are building in ChatGPT, you will need to download those files and run a local server to see the results. Most people don't know how to do this.
3. Shakespeare connects to git for version control (so you can revert changes). If you tell Chat GPT to make an edit to your website and you hate it, you will have a hard time getting back to the earlier version without git.
4. Shakespeare can clone entire open source projects just from a git URL and allow you to edit them directly in the web browser (chat can't do this)
5. Shakespeare is Nostr Native, and has custom-made tools it can call to ensure that it builds Nostr apps that work. Raw AI without these tools struggles to do this because it doesn't have enough training data on Nostr apps that work.
The easiest way to see all of this is to try it! Ask them both: "Build me a site like Twitter on Nostr"
Here is the result of that exact one prompt on ChatGPT :
(Spoiler: I tried downloading and running that zip folder, and it doesn't even install properly)
And the same one-shot prompt on Shakespeare (via shakespeare/claude-sonnet-4.5) with no additional edits:
ChatGPT
ChatGPT - Build Nostr Twitter Site
Shared via ChatGPT
Chirp - Decentralized Social on Nostr
A Twitter-like social network built on Nostr. Own your data, connect with anyone.