Chatgpt and Vim RegEx¶

Verfasst: 2023-01-16

I find Regex fascinating, but despite various attempts to acquire appropriate knowledge I am still at the level of a layman. Unfortunately. Chatgpt is since a few weeks the total hype. In some things rightly. I have only a very limited use in contrast to some project partners who use it to create product descriptions, SEO texts or entire presentations and the presentations with graphics from dall-e 2 or midjourney.

I noticed that chatgpt provides quite useful approaches for topics (Python, pandas, Javascript with some restrictions also Golang) for which a lot of information is more or less freely available on the net. Or topics to which questions have already been asked. I suspect that the models were fed with data from Stackoverflow, Github and others.

Imho chatgpt is here to stay and will not disappear. To the effects and consequences that will bring chatgpt and successor with it, I can, but especially I dont' want to make any forecasts. Others have done that enough. How will Google react to content created with chatgpt? What data and information was used to train the models? Was there possibly also something with copyright or NDA proven and how do the lawyers and courts react to the topic?

With legacy code chatgpt can do rather little.

A purpose for me I find especially with these things:

trivial code snippets that I can't extract from old projects but for which I would have to Google the syntax for the umpteenth time.
AI graphics generators because my graphics still look like they were drawn by a preschooler (sorry - nothing against preschoolers, but that's what my output looks like)
I get character descriptions generated for my neverending book project

and I have RegEx generated especially for Vim. This is partly very impressive for me what chatgpt delivers. RegEx for adhoc evaluations, analyses or when preparing data makes my daily business easier.

With programs and scripts, which also use or extend others, I try to dose the use of RegEx well or avoid it. I don't want to get stress with my coding partners :)

Small disadvantage the RegEx e.g. for substitutes come from chatgpt with /, i.e. one must quote if necessary. Over the years I have trained myself the substitute with : as separator among other things because for easier readability and I can do without the quoting.