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.

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