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Getting AI to write good SQL

(cloud.google.com)
477 points richards | 1 comments | 16 May 25 21:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.245s | source
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nashashmi ◴[16 May 25 22:31 UTC] No.44010349[source]▶
AI text to regex solutions would be incredibly handy.
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RadiozRadioz ◴[16 May 25 23:28 UTC] No.44010706[source]▶
This comment appears frequently and always surprises me. Do people just... not know regex? It seems so foreign to me.

It's not like it's some obscure thing, it's absolutely ubiquitous.

Relatively speaking it's not very complicated, it's widely documented, has vast learning resources, and has some of the best ROI of any DSL. It's funny to joke that it looks like line noise, but really, there is not a lot to learn to understand 90% of the expressions people actually write.

It takes far longer to tell an AI what you want than to write a regex yourself.

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1. CuriouslyC ◴[17 May 25 00:12 UTC] No.44010941[source]▶
I was using perl in the late 90s for sysadmin stuff, have written web scrapers in python and have a solid history with regex. That being said, AI can still write really complex lookback/lookahead/nested extraction code MUCH faster and with fewer bugs than me, because regex is easy to make small mistakes with even when proficient.