Regex Isn't Hard (2023)

Confession: Regex knowledge is one of those things I've let completely atrophy after integrating LLMs into my workflow. I guess if the day comes that AI/ML models suddenly disappear, or become completely unavailable to me, I'll have to get into the nitty gritty of Regex again...but until that time, it is a "solved problem" for my part.

Yeah, this is my heaviest use case too. Mostly because it generally does save me a bit of time and is easily verifiable with tools like rubular and then can tweak what is needed once 90% there.

IMO it’s a “language” you need to understand in order to use.

Just like you wouldn’t copy/paste any random snippet into your source code if you don’t understand exactly what it does.

I see a lot of broken regex at work from people who use regular expressions but don’t understand them (for various reasons).

It used to come with a “found this on stackoverflow”-excuse, but mostly now it’s “AI told me to use this” instead.

yeah programmers famously understands all the random boilerplate incantations they copy past in their code to get things going.

totally definitively

We all have our own ideas of Utopia I guess :)

It's hilarious that the most reliable way to write a complex regex is to fire up billions of dollars of state of the art ML code and ask for what you want in English.

I know some people consider this fine. I do not. The fact that the world is not ideal does not mean that we cannot continue to improve things.