A recirculated claim that bypassing regular expressions is a highly advantageous strategy sparks debate among software developers
Story Overview
A casual tweet declaring that skipping regex study was a smart move has resurfaced and drawn fresh attention, with Google DeepMind engineer Xiao Ma reposting it and founder Bojan Tunguz quoting in agreement. The exchange taps into developer fatigue with regex syntax while noting that today's AI coding tools can generate patterns from plain language, though no data or benchmarks back the broader claim.
Legacy Skills Face New Scrutiny
The thread extends the point to other once-essential proficiencies like deep C++ knowledge, suggesting automation now handles what once demanded personal mastery. This framing resonates because it questions which technical foundations still justify the learning investment when abstraction layers keep rising.
Reliability Questions Stay Open
Nothing in the circulating posts measures how well AI-generated regex handles edge cases, security risks, or long-term maintenance, leaving the practical payoff of avoidance untested. The discussion therefore highlights an ongoing tension between anecdotal wins and the need for verifiable outcomes.
Positive users view AI handling regex as a win or relief from learning it, while negative users call avoiding the skill a bad take or Dunning-Kruger effect and insist regex remains worth mastering.
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Most Activity
I used to feel bad because I never mastered c++ to my satisfaction, then I thought the AIs could do it for me.
Turns out they also hate c++.
turns out never learning regex was genius
@shafu0x Learning regex taught me about lexers, which helped me to understand compilers better. Using regex taught me about the limitations of parsing
@shafu0x wt[hf]\s+you|u/s+mean\?
@shafu0x copy paste stackoverflow till post-ai
I feel this way about so many technologies.
turns out never learning regex was genius
@shafu0x Really useful when parsing text though.
@danielrmay weird flex but ok
@shafu0x I’m afraid it’s still very much worth knowing so you can verify the correctness of or diagnose the issues with generated regex
@shafu0x As a self-taught engineer, it was my first real exposure to Chomsky hierarchy, and more deeply language theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
@shafu0x Regex feels less like something you learn and more like something you reference as needed, at least at first glance.
On the flip side, it looks like you can get away with bloody murder with it anywhere it's allowed, so I wonder if maybe I shouldn't deep dive it sometimes...
@shafu0x Just a demonstration of why the "learning anything is useless now we have AI" aphorism might not be right. Apologies for interfering with your engagement strategy :o)
@sandrorybarik genius
@shafu0x also it’s just not that hard
@shafu0x regex for me was like vi commands -- i learned a workable subset that is slightly different from everyone else's workable subsets because only a handful of freaks know and leverage the whole capability
@CJHandmer They love Python, and they seem to also use JSON as their save file format whenever i vibecode something that needs a save file.
@shafu0x Reg was the most stupid thing that happened in the tech history and unfortunately all the LLMs are dying for it by default
@shafu0x What if you're autistic and you are passionate about regex
@shafu0x 😆😆😆😆I think everyone can agree that ai taking care of regex for us is a win
@CJHandmer Have you noticed they’re better at rust than C++?
@vexxed344 @shafu0x yes, they’re very useful but you don’t have to actually write them anymore by hand because of LLMs