ChatGPT can teach you LSL and even write code for you — kinda

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When I first tried out ChatGPT late last year, I noticed that many people were using it to write code. Python. Javascript. Even machine language. So of course I asked it if knew LSL, the Linden Scripting Language used in Second Life and OpenSim.

It said no. I was disappointed but not too surprised. After all, LSL isn’t one of the big languages. It probably doesn’t have enough training data.

Today, for some random reason, I decided to try again, and it not only knew LSL, but could explain how it worked. Maybe I worded the question wrong last time?

It can even talk about the differences between LSL and OSSL, the OpenSim Scripting Language, and write OSSL-specific scripts.

Warning: It’s not perfect

We’re still in the beta release of ChatGPT.

It makes mistakes.

So test all code carefully. However, if there’s an error, you can ask ChatGPT to fix it.

And if you don’t understand why it did something, or prefer it took a different approach, you can tell it that, too.

The company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, is working on improving its accuracy — and the billions just invested by Microsoft will definitely help.

From what I’m hearing, developers are finding that ChatGPT can already significantly speed up their workflow, but that it doesn’t completely replace them. Yet.

When I asked it to recreate the Very Simple Greeting Script by Jester Knox, it took quite a bit of prompting. On the first try, it forgot a key step. When I pointed that out, ChatGPT apologized and rewrote the script with the step added. Then I asked it to use different commands than it had chosen.

All in all, it took it four tries to get to the exact script I was looking for.

My verdict?

Right now, ChatGPT is like a very junior programmer who still makes a lot of mistakes, is supremely confident in their abilities, but is at least willing to admit when they’re wrong.

I can definitely see the potential here for creating simple scripts, especially if I need to tweak those scripts a lot.

But the big deal here, of course, isn’t in what it can do right now, but in what it will be able to do tomorrow.

“Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law,” Google CEO Sunchar Pichal said in a post last week.

So if a big part of your day-to-day workflow involves writing LSL or OSSL scripts, it might be time to look for ways in which ChatGPT can speed things up. For example, you can ask it to add comments to existing code. You can ask it to outline a coding project. You can ask it to write documentation, or to create slightly different versions of scripts. If you don’t understand how something works, you can ask it to explain it to you.

You can even paste in an existing script — maybe something from the Outworldz free scripts collection — and ask ChatGPT what the script does, then ask it to suggest some ways to use this script in an OpenSim grid.

Maria Korolov
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