I have generally been unimpressed with AI as a coding assistant, at least where it’s built into my IDE. (My experimenting as been with GitHub Co-Pilot and ChatGPT).
Sometimes it works well, and can really impress you. But often, I’ve found the suggestions either be totally wrong – making up functions that don’t exist, not following coding standards, etc.
But I did find one thing that it does seem to be useful for – reverse engineering a regular expression (to explain what a regular expression means, in English).
Here’s an example I tried:
Prompt (to ChatGPT)
Explain PHP RegEx /^(?=.[0-9])(?=.[A-Z]).{8,}$
Response
The PHP regular expression you provided:
/^(?=.*[0-9])(?=.*[A-Z]).{8,}$/
Breaks down as follows:
^: Asserts the start of the string.(?=.*[0-9]): Positive lookahead assertion. It asserts that somewhere in the string there is at least one numeric character ([0-9]).(?=.*[A-Z]): Positive lookahead assertion. It asserts that somewhere in the string there is at least one uppercase alphabetic character ([A-Z])..{8,}: Matches any character (except newline) at least 8 times ({8,}). This ensures that the total length of the string is at least 8 characters.$: Asserts the end of the string.
Therefore, this regular expression ensures that the string:
- Contains at least one numeric character.
- Contains at least one uppercase alphabetic character.
- Has a minimum length of 8 characters.
It can be used, for example, to validate passwords to ensure they meet certain complexity requirements, such as having a mix of numbers and uppercase letters and being of a certain length.