It doesn't. It perhaps shouldn't.

That said, I found myself doing little text mangling tasks with GPT-4 instead of appropriate command line tools, because fuck if I remember the flags to sort and unique, and it's much faster to just describe what I want and have the LLM take a crack at it.

This is why, I think, you'll see a lot of simple(ish) tasks being done by LLMs, at couple orders of magnitude more compute cost - it's just that much more convenient.

Typing out the instructions, copying and pasting the data, then analyzing the output for correctness is faster than running `sort -h` ?

It can be less mental effort, not necessarily faster.

Faster than recalling or finding out again that it's `sort -h`, and not `sort -n` or `xargs -wtf -- sort -xkcd {}` or whatever.

But the LLM already "understands" the changes that need to be made. A regex to figure out if "flat" means "apartment" or not? Consider the text (which I just made up & I'm really not a fiction writer so I apologize for it being terrible):

"Oh, I live near there too! House or flat?"

Stanley hesitated. These questions were getting more and more personal. Was this her idea of casual conversation? Or was she trying to get to know him personally? Well, he thought, what could go wrong if I treat this like a conversation. "Flat," he said. And then asked a question of his own. "What kind of pop do you like?"

How are you going to decide if "flat" is talking about non-fizzy pop/soda, or a dwelling space with a regex? It's a lot closer to the word "pop."

Of course, GPT handles this perfectly https://chat.openai.com/share/fb6a56a2-749c-4e71-9506-541bb8...

Some places in America do say "pop" instead of "soda," so I'm hesitant to call it perfect...

But I'll admit I agree that this is well beyond the scope of regex.

Because replacing all appearances of apartment with apartment just apartment out isn’t going to work?