[username_my1]

regex is useful but chatgpt is amazing at it, so why spend a minute keeping such useless knowledge in mind.

if you know where to find something no point in knowing it.

[ykonstant]

Does gpt produce efficient regex? Are there any experts here that can assess the quality and correctness of gpt-generated regex? I wonder how regex responses by gpt are validated if the prompter does not have the knowledge to read the output.

[da39a3ee]

You don't have to be an expert; you should very rarely be using regexes so complex that you can't understand them.

[2devnull]

That was one of my first uh oh moments with gpt. Getting code that clearly had untestable/unreadable regexen, which given the source must have meant the regex were gpt generated. So much is going to go wrong, and soon.

[thecatspaw]

what does gpt say how we should validate email addresses?

[berkes]

> if you know where to find something no point in knowing it.

Nonsense. And you know it.

First, you need to know what to find, before knowing where to find it. And knowing what to find requires intricate knowledge of the thing. Not intricate implementation details, but enough to point yourself in the right direction.

Secondly, you need to know why to find thing X and not thing Y. If anything, ChatGPT is even worse than google or stackoverflow in "solving the XY problem for you". XY is a problem you don't want solved, but instead to be told that you don't want to solve it.

Maybe some future LLM can also push back. Maybe some future LLM can guide you to the right answer for a problem. But at the current state: nope.

Related: regexes are almost never the best answer to any question. They are available and quick, so all considered, maybe "the best" for this case. But overall: nah.

[pksebben]

While I agree with your point that knowing things matters, it is entirely possible with the current batch of LLMs to get to an answer you don't know much about. It's actually one of the few things they do reliably well.

You start with what you do know, asking leading questions and being clear about what you don't, and you build towards deeper and deeper terminology until you get to the point where there are docs to read (because you still can't trust them to get the specifics right).

I've done this on a number of projects with pretty astonishing results, building stuff that would otherwise be completely out of my wheelhouse.

[lolc]

Funny for me there have been instances where the LLM did push back. I had a plan of how to solve something and tasked the LLM with a draft implementation. It kept producing another solution which I kept rejecting and specifying more details so it wouldn't stray. In the end I had to accept that my solution couldn't work, and that the proposed one was acceptable. It's going to happen again, because it often comes up with inferior solutions so I'm not very open to the reverse situation.

[HumblyTossed]

This is something ChatGPT would say.

[gitaarik]

Sure, why bother understanding anything if ChatGPT can just produce the answers for you ;). You don't have to understand the answers even. Actually you don't need to understand the question also. Just forward the question from your manager to ChatGPT and forward the answer back to your manager ;). Why make life difficult for yourself?