Slowly hurtling towards 40K esque tech syndrome where only copies of existing tech can be made and no one knows how anything works. Can’t wait for the first tech priests to pop up in 5 years.

nobody knows how it works or how to fix it.

This is how all sufficiently complicated regex is.

some people are gonna make a lot of money cleaning up the messes caused by AI programming in a few years. shame nobody seems interested in heeding any of the warnings about this shit.

Regular Expressions are pretty core to understanding further automata in the more math-y computer science. I sometimes have trouble making them, or fitting them to whatever weird scheme some program uses. But thats because I'm "ok" at programming and was just barely getting B/C's in computer science classes.

Just a massive self report of a post for that guy. Hell there's even tools that actually work and (if you're paying attention) will indirectly teach you to do it yourself. Just like a lot of things in programming. But nope, "AI".

The smartest approach to regular expressions is to think about how to avoid needing them in the first place and that is exactly what this bazinga brain will be avoiding now.

The next is that if you do need regular expressions, keep it simple. If your regex is complex, you probably should have broken it down into multiple separate steps and sub-searches.

The next is that if you have determined you do need a very complicated regex, you should probably be writing a parser or using a parser generator so that it can be understood, improved, debugged, etc.

This bazinga is going to be getting a bunch of complex, non-debuggable regexes that are probably subtly wrong.

AI generated regex sounds absolutely horrible. There’s no way that shit would work.

Imagine still using regexes in current year. Every language has a parser combinator library, now, just write a damn parser and stop pretending you remember what a regular language is or that the garbage text you're processing is a sentence in one.

I don't need AI to not know regex i simply refuse to learn it by choice

Its going to hallucinate and do it wrong enough of the time that this fool will screw up any project he touches.

I'm imagining as years go by when/if this AI regex code breaks - nobody knows how it works or how to fix it. Am I wrong?

Nobody knows how to fix human generated regex either so I think he's fine.

Personally I don't think it's all that deep in this case. However, if we did assume that AI will result in the general "dumbing down" of developers the same way mobile phones have dumbed down average tech users, I don't think we'll be in an "end of history" scenario where no one can maintain code.

What'll likely happen is that dumbed down devs end up not progressing as highly or quickly, as employers select developers who can maintain and write code without AI training wheels. It'll be a dialectic relationship, where eventually methodical and knowledgeable devs are less preferable to the "dump a load of code held together with spaghetti" dev becomes preferable again.

If anything we've seen it happen for years. The technically minded Devs create high level tools or technologies that lower the bar of entry in some way - the lower bar creates a bunch of new Devs with less technical knowledge - the sustainability of systems written by less technical Devs requires new technical Devs to design new high level tools.

It's honestly great for tedious time consuming tasks like that, and you can always verify that it covers all your input formats just like you would with a regex you made yourself.

I'll be real, I use that shit so much for html it's not even funny

I use it to help me troubleshoot my python code, or give me a framework for some tedious data analysis stuff, but I always try to go back over it to make sure it's not fucking up somewhere I don't immediately see. I never use regex though, it could probably be pretty bad for that

It'll work but AI generally makes workable code that looks well formed but is in fact undocumented spaghetti code.

I would rely on it only for simple regex and even then only in non critical tasks. An AI is a particularly annoying intern and nothing more.

Of course these idiots are gonna use it to refactor segments of 50 year old legacy code originally written in FORTRAN.

Also you need to know regex for the same reason you need to know the fundamental theorem of calculus even though almost none ever needs it to actually solve anything.

$20/month doesn't include the externalized costs. Foolish take.