RegexPilot: Regular Expressions for Regular People (and no AI hallucinations)

RegexPilot by developer Kristof Polleunis, is an app designed to protect you and your work from the hallucinations and miscalculations AI can inject into the regular expressions you ask it to build.

Not Voodoo

It took a while, but I finally realized that regular expressions are not the computer voodoo I always assumed them to be. In 2026, even regular (non-developer) users are managing and searching large data sets of movies and tv shows, music, ebooks or even just collections of documents accumulated over the years. If you do find-and-replace in BBEdit, Nova, or Obsidian; clean up messy CSV exports; build filters in Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, or Alfred; or wrangle a marketing list full of inconsistent phone numbers, you are using regex whether you call it that or not.

Regular Expressions for Regular People

Although RegexPilot was built for people who already know how to build regular expressions, it has turned out to be a good tool for teaching the rest of us a thing or two. The way it works becomes quickly understandable. You describe what you want in plain English, get a draft, and then see it drawn out as a railroad diagram: anchors as start and end markers, character classes as colored pills, groups as bracketed branches. You fix the part that is wrong by dragging it, not by counting backslashes in a text field. Hovering over any node tells you what it does, and watching matches appear and disappear as you tweak teaches the difference between \b and \B, or what a lookahead actually does, faster than any reference page.

Why it's Better Than AI Alone

AI models are particularly good at writing regex, until they aren't. They fail, predictably, in a couple of ways. They rely on training data that doesn't differentiate between public and private IP addresses or it interprets all 10 digit numbers as belonging to US telephone customers. AI does pattern recognition. It doesn't think.

AI models also are prone to giving you the wrong flavor of regex. You're looking for something that will work in Python and you get a Javascript friendly version instead. If you're making a living doing this, you can't tell your customers "It worked in ChatGPT."

The honest fix for both is a verification loop: paste the draft into a tester, run it against the real engine, throw your edge cases at it, watch what lights up. RegexPilot is that loop collapsed into one window. The AI is built in (bring your own key for OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and others, or run a local model through Ollama or LM Studio), and anything it generates renders on the canvas and executes against the selected language's actual engine immediately. The "did it hallucinate" check happens before you ever paste back into your code. You are not replacing the AI; you are giving yourself somewhere to catch it.

Worth Exploring Further

Although I've worked in tech for a long time, I'm not a developer qualified to speak on the pros and cons of this app for that kind of work. Suffice to say, the documentation alludes to broad compatibility with multiple flavors of regex and promises that per-pattern recognition happens in milli-seconds.

The Regular Details

Privacy - No analytics, no telemetry, no account, no email list, nothing leaves the machine by default. The voice dictation runs entirely on-device via a bundled Whisper model, and if you point the AI at a local model instead of a hosted key, the app never touches the network at all. The only thing phoning home is license validation.

Pricing - RegexPilot needs macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer; the core app is about 8 MB, closer to 72 MB once the bundled engines are included. The JavaScript and TypeScript flavors are free forever, which for a lot of web work is the whole job. A single €19 one-time purchase unlocks all 21 flavors with their authentic engines, AI, voice, the full library, and every export format. There is a 30-day trial of everything, and no subscription, which in 2026 still deserves to be said out loud. Download it from regexpilot.com.

Roadmap - VS Code extension and a Raycast plugin are on the v1.1 roadmap, with a step-through debugger slated for v1.2. Bug reports go to his GitHub issues page, and he means it when he asks for them.