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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

I love that it’s replacing sed, awk, and cut in the same way you’d bring artillery to a knife fight.

I've seen some really f**ed up text formatted files in the wild. In those cases I really see value in using something more "intelligent" (and declarative rather than imperative) rather than coding a non-trivial number of [python|bash] lines of code, especially when dealing with one-timers.

I think our operating systems are going to have this stuff installed one day. It might replace most uses of the CLI.

But sed, awk etc.results are predictable and reproducible.

That's not guaranteed with ChatGPT.

You could try asking it to output the sed/awx/etc. commands needed to do the desired transformation reproducibly. If it's not yet good at that it will be soon.

It is good at that and you can only paste so much data into the UI, so usually go this route for complex one liners.

The question is if you can understand the solution if it's complex.

Just like the regex for valid email addresses, it may be correct but it's hard to understand it.

I see it more as a tool for doing the tedious but simple work, if it's getting complex you get a hard time checking the correctness of the result.

Casual reminder what you shouldn't try to parse email addresses for a validity with regex, besides checking for '@' aaaaaaaand maybe for '@\w+?\.\w+?' if you are sure the code would only face the globally addressable addresses.

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