this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
219 points (96.6% liked)
Programming
22550 readers
92 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That’s a great read. I’ve used AI a few times, and I’ve never used any of the code it’s spat out. The only thing it’s helped me with was telling me how to solve a bug when I knew what the problem was, but didn’t know the right RFC the solution was in (RFC 2047, about encoding non ASCII text in email headers, if you’re interested).
One big issue I have with AI is how utterly reliant on RegEx it is. Everything can be solved with a RegEx! Even if it’s a terrible solution with horrendous performance implications, just throw more RegEx at it! Need to parse HTML? Guess what! RegEx!
I've been using the AI to help me with some beginner level rust compilation checks recently.
I never once got an accurate solution, but half the time it gave me a decent enough keyword to google or broken pattern to fix myself. The other half of the time it kept giving me back my own code proudly telling me it fixed it.
Don't worry though, AGI is right around the corner. Just one more trillion dollars bro. One trillion and we'll provide untold value to the shareholders bro. Trust me bro.
Classic
The RegEx thing is so true in my experience. I started working on a Neovim plugin to make editing injected code easier, and instead of suggesting Treesitter integration it wanted to create its own parser using RegEx...
it's great at interpreting stack traces/logs/crash reports
I’ve never seen it recommend a solution using regex. And I’ve had it provide a lot of useful code. Perhaps you need to look into prompt engineering training?
Have you tried telling it not to suggest a regex solution?