💆 Regex Therapy: CLI Fun for Everyone! #AIRelevant

Regular expressions. Those cryptic strings of symbols that look like your cat walked across your keyboard. Maybe you've copy-pasted them from Stack Overflow and prayed they worked. Maybe you've avoided them entirely.

💆 Time to fix that!!!

This week we're making regex (REG-ex, short for regular expressions) actually make sense. No theory dumps, no computer science lectures. Just practical patterns you can use right away.

💆 What we'll cover:

We're using three command-line tools that all speak the same regex dialect, so you learn one syntax and use it everywhere:

• ack - Find stuff in files, fast. Like grep but smarter.
• rename - Bulk rename files without losing your mind.
• perl one-liners - Quick text transformations from the terminal.

All three are Perl-powered under the hood, which means consistent regex syntax across the board. Learn it once, use it three ways.

💆 You'll walk away knowing how to:

• Search your codebase without wading through junk
• Rename 500 files in one command
• Do find-and-replace operations that would take forever by hand

💆 Who's this for?

Anyone curious about the command line. Total beginners welcome. If you've ever thought "there has to be a faster way to do this," this session is for you.

💆 The AI Connection

Here's something we don't talk about enough: local AI pipelines generate a lot of messy output. Vision models give you fuzzy text that needs parsing. Image generators spit out files that need organizing. Batch processing needs smart pattern matching.

Regex is the glue that holds it all together.

We'll be using these exact techniques in upcoming AI sessions, so consider this your foundation work. Get comfortable with regex now, and you'll have superpowers when we start wiring up local models.