---
title: Recursively summarize blog posts with OpenAI and Ruby on Rails
slug: recursively-summarize-blog-posts-with-openai-and-ruby-on-rails
published_at: 2023-01-30 15:00:17 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:12:58 +0000
summary: 
description: Recursively summarize blog posts with OpenAI and Ruby on Rails  #rubyonrails #ruby #rails #openai #gpt3
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails, active record, ruby on rails tutorial, openai, open ai, recursive summary, recursively summarize, summarize in chunks, completions, open ai ruby, gpt-3]
views: 1572
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/recursively-summarize-blog-posts-with-openai-and-ruby-on-rails
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV6fPf6O3sY
youtube_id: VV6fPf6O3sY
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/VV6fPf6O3sY
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VV6fPf6O3sY/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Recursively summarize blog posts with OpenAI and Ruby on Rails

*Published: January 30, 2023*
*Views: 1572*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV6fPf6O3sY)

[![Recursively summarize blog posts with OpenAI and Ruby on Rails](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VV6fPf6O3sY/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV6fPf6O3sY)

## Description

Recursively summarize blog posts with OpenAI and Ruby on Rails

#rubyonrails #ruby #rails #openai #gpt3

## Transcript

foreign what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to use open AI to summarize our blog posts because on this website that I have here I want to show people a couple sentences that explain what they can find either in the article the blog post or the video so on the landing page of my website I always want to have at least one article video and podcast episode with the description so we're going to start with articles so you'll see this one is called handling web hooks for stripe connect and I've got quite a bit of text here there's some background differences between them I don't know why but my code formatting doesn't work unless you refresh something about turbo I think anyways I want to take all of this content and I want to pipe it into openai and ask it to summarize now what you'll find is if we just grab all of this content and we go over to the API playground and we say summarize this text and we paste in the content you'll notice that there's too many tokens for this model text DaVinci 3 we can only use up to I think 4 000 tokens or fourth this is 4001 but roughly 4 000 tokens and so one of the approaches for summarizing a big article like this is to recursively summarize chunks of it and then reassemble those summaries and build like a new common summary so we're going to use the open AI API for summarizing I don't know if I want to use DaVinci or one of the other cheaper models so yeah this is like the lowest cost model is this Ada model and then Babbage that's good for classifications semantic text yeah so we can just we can play around with the different models in the API call so I've already gone over to my API keys and grabbed my API key I set that in my rails credentials the next thing I want to do is talk about how I edit these articles and so I have a custom sort of edit view here that you have to log in to be able to see and here I'm able to enter a title a summary when it was published and then the body which is just written in markdown what I want is I want to add a button here that take all this text ship it off to open AI in chunks get back a bunch of summaries combine all those summaries ship it back off have it Rewritten into just a few sentences and then we'll use that as our summary so the goal today is to add a button here that will take the body of our article and write a summary for us that we can put in here and the long-term goal is to have this work across all of the articles that I have written so right now there's 36 but I want to be able to reuse this same pattern for um videos and podcasts as well all right let's first add a new button that will go on our summary view here so I have an articles form and below the summary which I really only I only show it on the edit view because I don't know for reasons okay so let's add a button here that says summarize okay so the type here is going to be button instead of submit because we are inside the middle of a form and what I want to do is I want to Let's actually just use a form here with the action summaries Maybe because we're going to go create a summary so the method will be Post Yeah okay that works that works that works and then we're gonna take that out oh you know what yeah okay so this is interesting so we are inside of another form right so we can't really like just write another form directly in here but what we can do is we can move this form outside and above our other form and then because all of the inputs are hidden we can yeah because all of the inputs are hidden we can use the button down below to Target that form that's up above so I think we can give this form an ID and this is going to be like summarize form or something and then we can tell our button that we want it to work on the summarize form I should have used input type I think I don't know let's just see let's see if this works so let's go first we got to fire up our server we're going to go to localhost 3000 we're going to go to articles find an article say edit put in our password okay so now we have this summarize button so let's inspect that button you'll notice that it is just a button and the other form like the summarize form is up here the summarize form is going to make a post request to the summaries endpoint with our authenticity token and the ID of the article so if we click on this button let's look in the network tab click on the button okay so nothing is happening right now so what I think we want to do is change this from type button to submit if we use it as type button then we have to use JavaScript to grab on and handle the click event okay so now when I click on summarize it is actually making a request yeah so this is making a post request and it includes the authenticity token to protect us from csrf attacks I'm the only one who uses this page so it's no big deal and then it has the article ID I think that's fine yeah instead of passing just the ID what we can do is use the globally unique identifier for that object so if we look up the ID for rails yeah so this is using Global ID we can use signed Global IDs so then we can use the global ID locator to find that object whether it's an article or a video or a podcast episode so yeah so let's use two sgid and then on our form so on our summarize form so article form here instead of putting in article ID we'll put in content ID and then here instead of article ID we're going to do what is it two sgid sgid yeah so now if we refresh our form here and take a look at what this is actually doing for us so instead of just having the ID of it you'll notice that now we have the name is Content ID and the value is this big long string and when you deserialize this string I think it's space 64 encoded when you deserialize it it will include the content type and some other things so let's see 64 decode there's a bunch of base64 decoding tools online I can never remember which one I like so we'll paste that in and say decode and so here what you have is this is what it was decoded to so you see the global ID includes the the name of the application it includes the class and it includes the ID when we call to sgid we can give it purposes and when it expires and a whole bunch of other things for security for this use case I don't actually care about any of those other things so we're just going to use that as is so that should be good to go we will need to use this locator the global ID locator to find that object once we get into our summarization controller okay I'm wondering if we should nest Content ID inside of anything or if we should just call that good but I think that's fine for now so we'll generate a new controller summaries controller and it's going to have just gonna have a create action for now okay so we're going to go to our routes and we're going to add a new resources summaries only create okay and then in our summaries controller we're going to have this create action which will look up it's going to look up the object so it's going to say model is global ID locator and we're going to locate based on param's content ID that's going to give us our model and then based on that we want to kick off a background job that will go out and make the API calls to open AI I'm like over optimizing right now and over generalizing but I hope you're tracking with me so now what we want to do is say something like summer it's going to be something like summarize job dot perform later and pass in the model and then we're going to just render sure render Json of like summarizing or something I don't know whatever this is fine okay so in practice if we were doing this synchronously we could swap out that input box and make sure that it's now populated again with the Articles summary but because we're going to make several API calls we have to compile some stuff and then make some more API calls so I don't want this to be a blocking thing so instead down the road we might need to use like turbo to refresh the page but I guess I don't really care too much about that but we do need to go create this summarized job rails G job summarize job and yeah so this is going to take in the content type so for now we can just say this is going to be like I don't know the content object so we can say if content dot is if it's an article then we want to do something here we're going to summarize the body okay and what I'm thinking is I don't know if we need to do any like pre-processing step for each of these different types but what we could do is say okay the text content is nil and we'll say text content is content.body in the case of article and then down here we'll say something like summarize so we'll get back us yeah we'll say summarize the text content and we're going to get back a summary okay and then summarize so here we need to like break the content into chunks and then we need to yep Summarize each chunk combine the summaries summaries and then we need to re-summarize the combined summaries okay so we're going to break the content into chunks so there's a couple different ways we could do this if we look at one of my articles if we say article.last.body you'll notice that the text content like the length for this is I don't know 13 000 almost 14 000 characters right and if we did like article body dot split on like space or like white space dot count now we have 2 000 words or something like this right so what I want to do is I want to break up the body but I don't want to break it up based on characters but what I'm thinking is I'm considering breaking on new line and then where there's two new lines consider those are chunks because I'm hoping that will give us a better breakdown of where the article like how the article is segmented so if you're curious about how to restore your local copy of postgres from your production Heroku database there is a video up about that and it's been getting quite a few views lately article.last.body.spliton new line and Dot count okay so 315 okay the bits that are code yeah that's another thing is I don't I wonder if we should I had this idea in the shower about every single code block having a button next to it that says explain this code I think that would be pretty killer so I don't want to make 315 API calls so now what we need to do is we need to chunk based on something else so now what we need to do is say or maybe we split on two new lines let's see what is that dot count 85 getting closer how about three new ones 25 25 is still a bit more than I would like also when there's a heading like this I think the headings also help break up the sections maybe if I do slash n pound sign okay so that gives us 12 chunks and what do those look like okay so this chunk is pretty good conclusion in this article you learn how to build automations blah blah okay so that is a nice chunk okay that is a great chunk here respond immediately and then process okay this is I think this is it this is what we're going to do dot count all right so it's going to make 12 API calls not the best but whatever that'll be fine that'll be fine okay we're gonna take this and that's what we're going to drop into our summarization job so This Is Us breaking into chunks so we're assuming that each chunk is going to start with a heading so the headings in markdown are going to be like pound or pound okay so this is going to give us our chunks now we need to iterate over our chunks so chunks.each do chunk or we want to map It Whatever map and we'll just call like summarize chunk and this is going to give us back our summarized chunks okay then let's make a new method here summarize chunk and this is what's where we're actually going to make the API call to open AI so open AI ruby gem there is a ruby open AI Gem and I used this on another project okay so we need to add this to our bundle and then we are going to new up a client so we're gonna go to our summarize job we're going to new up a client so that we can make API calls I might want to move this into some other like class or module or something but for now we're just going to hack This Together get it started rails okay so my access token is in rails.application.credentials openai and it's called key so that should be okay and then we want to make an API call and our API call is going to be yeah completions I think yes so we're going to use the completions API to summarize and we need to give it a prompt and then we need to give it the content so this is going to be like ours we're going to say yep client oh wow okay all right GitHub copilot the model we'll start with this model it'll be good prompt is going to be like so we need to create a prompt that works with this chunk so let's just say prompt like chunk prompt and our prompt is going to be yeah something like this so I took a bunch of blog posts I fed them into gbt3 and I said what is the writing style and tone of the author of all these different posts and then I combined all of those into my own writing style so I have this like CJ's writing style okay so here is a bunch of things that came from my blog posts in my tone and so what I want to do is like use that same content as part of my prompt so act as a developer Advocate write a summary that is informative Technical and helpful use a detailed and instructional writing style in this case because we are doing a summary I'm going to remove with specific examples code examples to demonstrate include instead of include recommendations and warnings I'm going to say include the most important points from the text use clear and concise language with a focus on explaining technical details of the integration and providing guidance for Developers okay the content should be neutral and avoid being overly promotional when possible okay I'm gonna I'm not gonna add promotional content and then I'm going to say something like the text is and then we'll plop the chunk and then we're going to say summary is and that's where we should get back our summary or like the response from the summary and so here for prompt I'm going to say chunk prompt of the chunk and okay what else do we need from here we need Max tokens okay so max tokens in this case the summary yeah let's say 200 or let's do 256. because when we're summarizing the chunks I want it to retain quite a bit of detail and then when we go back and do the final summary I actually only want one two three sentences that try to include as much detail as possible all right so we're writing a lot of code and we're not actually like testing a bunch yeah so here in the response from this client completions we're going to get back an object that has choices in it and each choice is going to have some text so let's yeah so what we're going to do is all right so we need to like actually test this stuff out so I'm going to put this down here private I think I can do this like little one-liner thing we'll see how that works we're going to make this API call to summarize a chunk so I'm going to reload my rails console and try to test this out by just calling summarizejob.new and then calling summarize chunk directly so I'm going to say summarize chunk like the dog jumped over the log or something I don't know unknown unknown keywords model prompt and Max tokens client oh this needs to be inside of parameters okay okay nice all right summarize job okay so the dog jumped over the log this is now this is this text is about a dog jumping over a log it's not helpful to developers perfect okay nice all right how about summarize something about how about the bowl library is good for background jobs in node.js let's see the bull library is a node.js module for running background jobs it's designed for handling long-running tasks that don't need okay nice so it's pulling in some other contacts that it already has that's pretty cool okay so now that we have those chunks we want to combine them all uh we want to concatenate all of these we can just do like dot join on new lines and then what we want to do is take our summaries and re-summarize them re-summarize the summaries okay this map is going to give us back an array so when we call summarize these summaries like this part is going to give us back an array so we might need to call flat flat map here so that it's a flat list of summaries okay and then re-summarize so we're going to pass in the summaries and the chunk prompt is this going to work so access developer Advocate write a summary that is informative okay technical helpful okay I'm going to do something similar but instead of using this Pro we're gonna we're just gonna shift it just a tiny bit so we're going to say act as a developer advocate write a two to three sentence summary that is informative technical helpful and okay use a detailed industry okay so it should be informative Technical and helpful okay whatever include the most important points from the text use clear and concisely okay so it's just going to re-summarize it so let's see how this one goes and then the max tokens here I think we can make it fewer let's just let's stay with 256 for now and see what we get back and then again we'll rejoin we'll join these I don't think there's going to be multiple choices I'm not actually sure when this gives you back multiple or not okay maybe because I'm not passing like top k or something then I only get one result so that should be all right but okay so let's see if we're ready to do this whole thing so if we summarize jobs we're going to perform on the content the text content starts out as nil if it's an article we're going to grab the body and we're going to call summarize with that con that article's body and summarize oh you know what we should do is we should yeah we don't want to use article.last here we want to use content.body.split on new line with that yeah okay so then here what we want to do is Chunks is going to be text content oh wait hold on text content yeah I think we're going to want to break each type of cont each type of content up differently Maybe so let's just say we're going to pass in the chunks so this is going to be content.body.split there we go okay so this becomes our chunks okay and then we don't need to do this and then we go through each of our chunks we flat map we summarize we re-summarize all right so let's spend some money every time you make an API call to open AI it is going to use some of your tokens which does cost money so let's open this up and we're going to say summarize job dot perform now article.last and okay I think okay let's just run it and see what happens all right summarize text content oh so this should be chunks oh okay it's doing something performing summarized job enqueued with this Global ID again this is actually using the same sort of global ID as what we saw on the UI also I'm remembering that in order for us to do this I have to have redis running so let's say redis server so fire up redis allow it to do stuff and then we also need to have our what are we using here for our worker sidekick bundle exec sidekick okay all right did our workers start up over here oh what look at this okay so it did summarize it to get started with stripe connect you first need to create a platform account a connected account is another type of stripe account okay so this is actually pretty damn good but it's too long so let's decrease the number of tokens here when we finally summarize let's say Max tokens is 100 and yeah so when we do our re-summarization two okay and okay include the most important points from the text or how about summarize okay reload and then we'll rerun this passing in the article okay we should probably put some debugging where it's it'll print out okay it's processing stuff or whatever and yeah so our worker or like our oh wait what okay so bin Dev there we go all right I don't know why I killed Ben death but our worker should come up and recognize that it has stuff to work on okay there it goes all right developers can use web hooks to automate actions that occur in their stripe account there are two types of web hook endpoints direct direct and account and connect web hook endpoints so I'm gonna have to edit some of this the most significant difference between direct and account okay also this is numbered right so it's giving me a sort of a numbered list is that's not what I wanted so summarize the important points from the text as a simple paragraph for a list for display on a list of articles okay I don't know if that's going to work but we'll see so reload it's so good at just like figuring out semantic meaning of things and then backing into answers it just kind of it's mind-blowing all right so to get started with stripe you'll need a platform account and a connected account connected account is another strip account okay there's two type of web hook endpoints and two type of one okay that is not a great summary let's simplify our prompt a little bit and then when we join our okay so let's do some debugging here so we're going to print out our summaries and then let's print out let's also print out our chunks okay and yeah let's see what happens okay so reload all right so this is our what is this this is our chunks okay did you know that you can build automations and triggers that happened blah blah um just thinking it's thinking yeah maybe we should also in our summarized chunk we'll say puts summarizing chunk and then we'll say puts got response or something all right okay this is a amazing summary this is an amazing summary I would use this right here okay so let's now that we've got that going on now what we want to do like once we get the summary back we want to store that back into our content on the summary so an article object has a summary text field a podcast episode has a what is it called it has a description and it has a formatted summary I'm thinking we add a summary field for podcast episode and then for video videos do have a summary already okay we'll come back and add that to podcasts later but for now what I wanted to check was can I just in in my job here can I just say content dot update summary is summary and I should be able to and let's also check like yeah I'm wondering if we should say only updated if it doesn't have a summary I almost want to have the force thing like skip over yeah okay we should do that in a higher level thing so this should be fine I'm going to use update bang in case something fails and here we go so we'll say reload actually let's do it from from the browser so we'll refresh our page here and let's actually go back to our articles go to yeah taking a cut with stripe connect and then we'll go to edit and click summarize and this should hit this controller perform the job all right let's just see what happens click summarize and did anything happen form responses must redirect to another location so we got an error back chunks flat map oh what why does it okay so it thinks that chunks is nil because it is here does it not think we're on an article summaries controller it says form responses must redirect to another location I don't know so let's just say redirect to model I think that should maybe work summarize why is the model nil uh-oh P Rams Content ID okay click on summarize posting two summaries con here's the content ID here's the whole thing and maybe I'm doing this wrong so can I not go let's see foreign locator dot locate ID nil what okay did I not read the instructions here well enough to Global ID oh locate signed does that is that what I need let's see boom all right so that's what we I got that wrong so we need to locate the signed version oh yeah and then render or redirect to model and all right so we're going to go back over to our controller here refresh the page click on summarize again we got redirected back to this and all right so now we can go back to edit and see no our summary field is not populated yet that's probably because okay yeah here summarizing chunk summarizing okay yeah so it's still working and so now if we refresh the page boom look at this use application fees when you need to query okay so this this came out as bullets again so let's see I don't know why it's bullets and not like a paragraph it's probably because I said okay let's just remove that and write a two to three sentence summary paragraph right a simple summary paragraph in this article you'll learn how to and then I'm going to leave that blank so that it will start with that summary and then it should complete it I don't know let's let's see so let's refresh the page I'm going to wipe this out and we're going to click summarize and then we'll look at our logs okay so let's refresh and see if we got a new summary still no summary yet refresh oh that's on the public version so edit okay here we go to take Commission on payments okay this is pretty good take Commission on payments flowing through a stripe integration you can use direct or destination charges withholding a small amount withholding a small payment when transferring funds to a connected account and yeah or using account debits you can also collect recurring payments from your users including application fee parameter wow this is pretty good all right so then yeah so I'm going to say submit and now when I go back to my articles under taking a cut it now has this nice summary about what the article is about so I'm pretty happy with that I'm going to have to edit each of them and clean them up but I can use grammarly to help me with that and so yeah I'm feeling pretty good about the state that these are in so that was like a cool way to use open Ai and recursively I think yeah somewhere out there on the internet there is guides for this process called recursive leasing a big document so head over and search for that if this is something that you're trying to do cool so yeah we'll leave it at that thanks so much for watching really appreciate your time and attention and we'll see in the next one [Music]

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