Honestly, writing a regex is way easier than reading a regex, no? So it feels like now I have the harder task of proving that the generated regex is correct.
How did I not know about this! Thank you very much. This solves my biggest gripe with regex.
> my coworkers were happy about it because they could understand the regex and even modify it.
The most important point. Computers might read code efficiently, but if people can't reason about it, that is a recipe for bugs to sneak in.
Writing is easy; reading is hard.
That's why LLMs aren't much help to me -- they just increase my workload by giving me more code to read and review. If I write it myself, I already know what it means, so that saves time and effort.
For me the fastest way is to ask generator to create a valid and not necessarily correct regex, so that I can tweak it. I successfully used gpt for just that recently. It even got the capture groups right.