welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP edition of Regular Expression Puzzles and AI Coding Assistants: 24 puzzles solved by the author, with and without assistance from Copilot, ChatGPT and more. As the long title suggests, this book is divided into a number of individual puzzles, and those are grouped into general themes related to the complexity and features of the regular expressions needed to solve the puzzles.

The puzzles, however, are a scaffolding to let readers also understand the capabilities and limitations of tools like Copilot and ChatGPT. These tools can sometimes generate amazing source code from only minimal prompts describing the purpose of the code. At the same time, the same tools can instead generate complete gibberish, or still worse generate code that is superficially plausible and beautifully laid out that actually performs a quite different operation than a developer hopes for.