Developer Tests Own Published Data Tool With Custom Exam, Finds Regex Classifier Badly Flawed
A developer who built a regex-based classifier to sort 20,000 YouTube comments into needs, chatter, and signals decided to stress-test the tool using an evaluation framework they had previously written. The classifier, which relied on keyword matching rather than AI, was found to misfile comments due to character-level coincidences — a Korean phrase meaning 'doesn't pay' was flagged as an error report because it shared characters with the keyword 'doesn't work.' Running 15 test cases through the classifier, only 8 were handled correctly, with several failures rated as fatal since misclassified comments feed real product and business decisions. The experiment also revealed structural gaps in the evaluation guide itself, including an unaccounted trap type unique to character-matching tools and a grading framework that could not be reused across different project domains. The author concluded that the classifier's inability to flag uncertainty — forcing every comment into a category regardless of confidence — is a fundamental flaw under the principle that a wrong confirmation is worse than no confirmation.
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