A New Approach to Regex — Tackling the most tedious coding chores with AI

Disclaimer: This blog post was published prior to You.com’s latest AI advancements and may not reflect our current capabilities. You.com has transformed from a search engine to an AI assistant. With a foundation in search and the team’s AI expertise, You.com was perfectly positioned to enhance LLMs with live access to the Internet to address issues around hallucinations and transparency. As such, You.com is capable of tasks ranging from searching online to writing an essay, debugging code, creating digital art, solving complex problems, and more. Learn more about getting the most out of You.com.

You.com also offers its core technology through a suite of self-serve APIs. Get complete details about the YOU API.

/[^ ]+.com$/

Know what’s above? It’s an example of a regular expression (regex) in computer programming. A regex is a sequence of characters that specifies a pattern in text, and /[^ ]+.com$/ can be used to find all of the times that your name pops up on the internet. Sound complicated? You’re not the only one who thinks so. Many developers know the struggle of learning and working with these seemingly arbitrary, cryptic series of characters. Even when mastered, regexes’ power to detect patterns in data cannot distract from the fact that writing them is a repetitive chore.

But why should these powerful expressions continue to throw developers for a loop? Is it truly necessary that they master regexes’ overloaded syntax and various dialects?

At You.com our goal is to build the best search engine for coders that puts users at the center of the equation and helps them to accomplish more, faster. So we built YouCode AI: Regex, a tool that generates customized regexes from plain English so that coding can be less of a chore. Intrigued? Keep reading and send this to all your programmer friends.

What is YouCode AI: Regex?

YouCode AI: Regex is an intuitive tool that lets you generate customized regexes from plain English and supercharges your coding speed. Trigger the app right in your search results by making a relevant query on You.com. Then, simply type in a request, press “Generate Code”, and copy and paste the results into your code.

How does it work?

YouCode AI: Regex is trained on a multi-billion parameter neural network and performs prompt engineering based on a task it is given. Since it’s trained on such a large, diverse amount of code, it generates highly personalized results and can tackle regex questions of any level of difficulty. Due to the sheer size of the network, even for experts, it’s going to have examples of never-before-seen regexes. Use it to:

Validate date formats

Find instances of phone numbers

Check for a specific string in text

Why is YouCode AI: Regex transformative?

You.com strives to make the world’s information useful for you, and in its simplest form, YouCode AI: Regex allows us to deliver on this mission by solving a common coding chore. However, through this feature, we also want to give users an inside look into the world’s latest advances in natural language processing. There is a natural tension between speed and size when you work with a multi-billion parameter network. Yet, YouCode AI: Regex provides a snappy experience that stuns standard open AI — no more waiting for 20 to 30 seconds for a response from a GPT-3 backed API. Our model requires extremely specialized software and hardware in addition to hundreds of gigabytes of memory. To ensure speed, we conducted rigorous performance testing across a number of optimizations. We hope all can learn from the generations brought about by our solution to this demanding technical challenge.

How does YouCode AI: Regex differ from competitor tools?

YouCode AI: Regex provides functionality never before seen in a search engine. It automatically triggers with any relevant query and gives users the tools to make their content directly in their search results. Unlike traditional search engines, YouCode AI: Regex is a tool you can use to generate customizable solutions in seconds — even on the solutions that haven’t been done before. YouCode AI: Regex is also incredibly specialized. It will generate code with a higher level of accuracy than general-purpose code suggestions tools like GitHub copilot.

What’s next?

A customized generator for Regex is only the start. The diversity of our multi-billion parameter model means we can use it to write SQL, Kubernetes commands, and Spark code or tackle just about any day-to-day coding chore. We plan to keep releasing personalized tools to help you make your own content. Follow along and stay updated on our journey. There’s a lot in store.

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