Getting AI to write good SQL

AI text to regex solutions would be incredibly handy.

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.

I know regex. But I use it so sparingly that every time I need it I forgot again the character for word boundary, or the character for whitespace, or the exact incantation for negative lookahead. Is it >!? who knows.

A shortcut to type in natural language and get something I can validate in seconds is really useful.

How do you validate it if you don’t know the syntax? Or are you saying that looking up syntax –> semantics is significantly quicker than semantics –> syntax? Which I don’t find to be the case. What takes time is grokking the semantics in context, which you have to do in both cases.

That doesn’t answer the question. By “validate”, I mean “prove to yourself that the regular expression is correct”. Much like with program code, you can’t do that by only testing it. You need to understand what the expression actually says.

Testing something is the best way to prove that it behaves correctly in all the cases you can think of. Relying on your own (fallible) understanding is dangerous.

Of course, there may be cases you didn't think of where it behaves incorrectly. But if that's true, you're just as likely to forget those cases when studying the expression to see "what it actually says". If you have tests, fixing a broken case (once you discover it) is easy to do without breaking the existing cases you care about.

So for me, getting an AI to write a regex, and writing some tests for it (possibly with AI help) is a reasonable way to work.