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Getting AI to write good SQL

(cloud.google.com)
478 points richards | 1 comments | 16 May 25 21:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | 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. nevf1 ◴[17 May 25 09:52 UTC] No.44013224[source]▶
I respectfully disagree. Thankfully, I don't need to write regex much, so when I do it's always like it's the first time. I don't find the syntax particularly intuitive and I always rely on web-based or third party tools to validate my regex.

Whenever I have worked on code smells (performance issues, fuzzy test fails etc), regex was 3rd only to poorly written SQL queries, and/or network latency.

All-in-all, not a good experience for me. Regex is the one task that I almost entirely rely on GitHub Copilot in the 3-4 times a year I have to.