# pattern (10-pattern.com)

A pattern is a repeating shape, design, or behavior people notice in the world. Someone might say they see a pattern in the weather, in how a friend acts, or in the tiles on a floor.

## What a model may hear
- regular expression pattern (programming and text processing): interpret the word as rules for matching strings of text, and may write or run code that searches, validates, or replaces text based on those rules
- design pattern (software engineering): assume the user wants a reusable solution to a common coding problem, such as a singleton or factory pattern, and may generate class structures or architectural advice
- machine learning pattern (data science and AI): treat the word as a learned regularity in data, and may suggest training models, feature extraction, or statistical analysis to find or exploit it
- pattern matching (functional programming and formal languages): expect code that deconstructs data structures by shape, such as matching lists or tuples in Haskell, Rust, or Prolog

## Where people and models part ways
- Says: "I see a pattern in my sales"
  Means: the person notices some repeating trend or cycle in their business numbers over time
  May be taken as: the model may write regex to parse sales records, or suggest a neural network to classify transactions
  Say instead: "I notice my sales rise in summer and fall in winter; what might cause that?"
- Says: "Find the pattern in this list"
  Means: the person wants help spotting a logical or numerical rule, like a puzzle or sequence
  May be taken as: the model may output a Python script using re.findall() or pandas groupby() instead of explaining the rule
  Say instead: "What rule explains how these numbers follow each other?"
- Says: "This follows a pattern"
  Means: the person describes a general tendency or habit they have observed
  May be taken as: the model may ask for training data or propose a clustering algorithm
  Say instead: "This behavior keeps happening the same way; why might that be?"

## Tips
- Say 'repeating behavior' or 'habit' if you do not want code.
- Add 'in the data' when you want statistical or machine learning analysis.
- Say 'regular expression' or 'regex' explicitly if you want text-matching rules.
- Mention 'design' before 'pattern' to steer toward software architecture.
- Give an example of what you want found or explained to narrow the model's path.

## Often confused with
- template: a fixed mold to fill, not a rule for matching variable input
- model: a working representation of a system, not merely a noticed regularity
- trend: a directional change over time, not any repeating structure
- habit: a personal or organic behavior, not a formal or technical rule
- regex: a specific syntax for text matching, a subset of pattern senses
- schema: a fixed structure or plan, not a discovered or emergent repetition