Catchy title huh? it Rhymes and everything.
Anyway, my Twitter timeline has been non stop about ChatGPT this, and ChatGPT that for the past few weeks – and I’ve seen it doing some pretty cool stuff.
I also keep hearing how it’s going to make Software Developers redundant, so it got me thinking about something I do every few days as a Sitecore Developer:
“Can ChatGPT write some decent Sitecore PowerShell Extensions scripts?”
TLDR: Yes it can. Not terrible anyway. Read on to find out more.
Wait, what is ChatGPT?
Chances are that you already know what it is else you probably wouldn’t be reading this, but just in case – ChatGPT is an impressive AI Chatbot created by OpenAI (backed by Microsoft & others) that can take inputs and provide some very comprehensive and usually pretty accurate answers.
The Tests – How did ChatGPT do?
So I fired up my browser, created an account on https://chat.openai.com/ and after waiting for it to become less busy for a while, I got started with asking for some SPE scripts:
ChatGPT Test 1 – Create me an Sitecore item
I thought I’d begin with something fairly simple – creating an item, it seemed like a nice place to start. It’s often something I need to script (perhaps usually to create a bunch of items). This is what came back:
My Score = 6/10
Other than the fact it seems to have tried to import SIF at the top of the script!?, Initially I was quite impressed as it looked pretty close to what I would write myself.
However when I tried to run the script in the SPE ISE (using the Sample Item Template Id) it was clear that it had some of the parameters incorrect. It had miss-understood how to use the -ItemType and had also tried to pass -Template in as a parameter and there is no such thing so it wasn’t quite right but not a bad effort. After correcting these issues this is the final working script:
ChatGPT Test 2 – Unlock all Items for a User
This time I went for something a little more tricky, unlocking items is something I’ve quite often need to do in the past – where users have gone on Holiday and left an lot of items locked for example. Here is what it came up with: 
My Score = 9/10
Again it tried to import SIF at the top of the script, but other than that it actually created some working code. Amazingly similar to Marek’s SSE answer:
I was able to just remove the SIF imports at the top and run it and it seemed to work. It took a while (as I have a lot of test content locally) and there is no logging to show what happened but it didn’t error and did complete. Here is the working script:
ChatGPT Test 3 – Remove all old versions of an Item
This time I tried something I’ve had to do recently and took quite some time to write as was fairly complex. I wanted a script to remove all but the 10 most recent versions of an item but to always keep item versions that are 3 months old or less as well. Here is the script it came up with:
My Score = 3/10
These more complex scenarios and perhaps where ChatGPT starts to fall down a bit. It has tried to build two list (one of old versions and one of recent versions) and then remove the versions from the item and then add back the recent and old versions in memory.
This won’t work as it’s not updating the item itself and it’s not possible to set the Versions property on the item like this (instead $itemVersion| Remove-ItemVersion should be used). The logic is also not quite right here for sorting and filtering the versions. If you compare my script linked above there is quite a lot missing and wrong here due to the nuances with Sitecore item versions.
ChatGPT test 4 – Create me a package with a UI
A final test is also a task I’ve implemented recently. The scenario was a bit more complex than this but I thought I’d see how it got on with something similar:
My Score = 2/10
The script created here isn’t great to be honest. It didn’t quite get the properties correct for the Treelist UI. It has created the Package ok but the Add-ItemToPackage method does not exist, it should instead be using New-ItemSource.
Similarly it seems to have made up a function called Save-Package which should instead be Export-Package. Lastly it’s tried to offer me an link to the package to download it, which won’t work as it needs to either be an link to the default packages folder or use the Download-File option instead to present it to the user to download.
Interestingly when I tried to re-word my instructions to see if I could get it to use the Download-File method it actually tried to add items in a different (but still incorrect) way and tried to use the inbuild .NET Framework methods to download the zip to my browser which won’t work in the context of SPE ISE:
Conclusion
So am I worried I’ll be surplus to requirements anytime soon? In short – not currently no. The average of my (not so scientific test) was 5/10.
I think the nuances of a complex platform like Sitecore are hard for an AI powered tool to fully understand to an extent where it can automate code to an good-enough standard currently.
However, I think it could be a great starting point for an SPE script, especially for stubbing out the basics of something. It could also be really useful if Google or SSE fails you and you just can’t find any example code for a task you are working on. It is also very impressive that it can interpret what I’m asking for so well and write some half decent code.
I am not exactly sure how it works, but I’m guessing it’s injesting information from Sitecore Blogs, SSE, Sitecore Documentation Sites and reading the Dlls/Code online, as well as taking learning input from trainers and end-users.
If so then over time it’s going to become better and better and writing code and eventually I might be down the Job Centre wondering what happened.
If it manages to absorb Mark Kassidy’s brain then we will all be in Trouble…
