What if I say "it's probably okay just this one time" before I do it every time?

The new Code Interpreter plugin that went live for this week for Plus users can actually execute Python code on a sandboxed environment. This allows you to add "Write and execute tests for the regex" to the end of your prompt.

I typically try 3.5 first and switch to 4 if the results aren't great. 3.5 typically handles basic use cases quite well, for example, writing regex that detects jira ticket naming nomenclature. For more complex things, I go to 4.

It sometimes gets things wrong, but I've also found that just saying "that didn't work" gets it to reevaluate for more complex situations

You can improve the reliability if you provide it test cases. You can now be the PM you wish you had for the robot that will eventually replace you.

Also curious. If I had some AI help with regex that would be awesome. But I felt as you said it wouldn’t work great without 4. Which I don’t have.

I agree, my regex experience was not great.

I often need to deal with half a dozen different programming languages in any day/week and the context switching can be difficult at times. When you've spent all day switching between JavaScript, Python, and YAML and suddenly need to draft some Regex, tools like ChatGPT can help immensely at reducing the mental burden of switching gears.

If the project is less than a thousand lines of code in a language with a garbage collector, it probably is. Most other problems don't require learning a DSL to handle them, and most other DSL's aren't nearly as terse.

I feel bad for you, son...

totally!!!

That depends on the regex flavor. Some of them have full support for variable length lookbehinds, for example JavaScript and third-party regex module for Python.

A variable length lookbehind is the same as the opposite of a variable length lookahead.

That's the problem. It will confidently give you an correct sounding answer.

If it is actually true is a different topic. So don't just blindly trust it. Verify, or at least sanity check it.

Regex isn't difficult, just annoying to ensure it is bug-free. If ChatGPT can help, then I don't know why you wouldn't be in favor of it

It's not that I'm incapable of evaluating regex, but rather the mental burden of evaluating complex regex statements and determining their purpose can be time-consuming. Why take 20 minutes to understand some regex when ChatGPT can do it in 20 seconds?

It's often developers who never took a finite automata class who I've seen struggle with regular expressions.

It's kind of like writing code in C while not understanding how memory management works

Still a bit new to Jira, what are Jira queries?

I use regex101.com

Up to now that usually was faster than trying to get chatGPT to generate something worthwhile. However, if you define some test cases first, the combination of both will even get the sales guy there eventually.