Regular Expression Puzzles and AI Coding Assistants

6 Conclusions

Because AI coding assistants often feel so human in their responses and completions, it is enormously tempting to anthropomorphize them and imagine that they have a “mental model” of the computer programs and regexen that they are writing (whether correctly or erroneously).

This belief is, of course, completely wrong. It is not merely wrong in the sense that large language models are built from silicon and linear algebra rather than from ganglia and axons, however. The LLMs of today’s AI coding assistants are very specifically not “knowledge engines” (also called “expert systems” in some contexts). There does exist a different kind of computer system that tries to represent taxonomies, ontologies, inference rules, and other elements ...