Not so useless. In my experience LLMs are about 50/50 on making a regex that actually works and covers the cases you asked it for. Even less when you get into cases needing advanced features like backreferences and lookahead.
Wow really cool! Genuinely fun, and educational at the same time.
One usability request: after firing a regex, could the text box be cleared? It's not hard to hit Ctrl+A and start typing again, but it does add a bit of friction. (I can send a PR)
I don't understand the first "combat" level. There's no real defining pattern separating the good from bad hex strings, so it's just a typing speed contest to type all the enemy patterns, right? What am I missing?
Haha, this is nice. I'm bad at regex most of the time. Playing this felt like when I first switched from Visual Studio to Vim. it’s a bit of a learning curve. It’s an interactive game btw
The colors are difficult for colorblind people. Orange/green is difficult already, and then green turns into red depending on the state? Ugh. Looks fun but unplayable for me.
Does not render correctly on iOS (mobile Safari)? It’s a fixed Desktop view and you can’t pinch to zoom as needed. It takes effort to prevent mobile users like this! Do others get this experience?
Really fun. I just wish that stats were saved in localhost (like combat mode progress) and that esc instantly ended the round if you know you will lose.
Cute. I had a crack at it but for me the fatal flaw is having to specifically delete the last regex before entering the next one, especially as the action gets tight. Each regex should go away once it's submitted, duh...
I played through the training level and it took me a minute to realize it's sub string/grep match. So in the first training level the pattern . matches everything when it feels like it should be .* to match all the characters of the enemies.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 70.0 ms ] threadhttps://mdp.github.io/2026/03/17/the-kids-are-alright-and-th...
Let’s wait how affordable, available and good AI is when the companies turn to profit maximization and enshittification begins
We made a similar game several years ago for the Pyweek game competition, but there wasn't the fun "letter invaders" style that this one has.
https://pyweek.org/e/RegExExpress/
I really like your implementation!
Might be good to limit some of the special operators to give more focus -- otherwise the early levels are a bit too solvable with ".*"
One usability request: after firing a regex, could the text box be cleared? It's not hard to hit Ctrl+A and start typing again, but it does add a bit of friction. (I can send a PR)
The UI looks great!