Regex Explainer
https://regex-explainer.gumballtools.com/api/mcp ↗
Description
Explain a regex in plain English and detect catastrophic backtracking risk.
What our measurements say
Regex Explainer is a remote MCP server published at regex-explainer.gumballtools.com. It has been probed 6 times since 9/12/2026. It answered in 6 of them (100.0%), a near-uninterrupted record. Median response time is 2,135 ms, a delay an agent will notice. It offers a narrow, focused set of 1 tools. On the protocol side it speaks the 2026-07-28 stateless spec.
Agent readability score
Can an LLM agent pick the right tool here — names, descriptions and parameter clarity are assessed.
Agent readability score
Strengths
- Tool name directly indicates purpose (explaining regex patterns)
- Description includes both explanation and safety-check use cases
- Single required parameter with clear type and purpose
Weaknesses
- No explicit documentation of error handling beyond catastrophic backtracking
- Lack of optional parameters for customization (e.g., output format, depth of explanation)
explain_regex— Description could explicitly mention other potential failure modes beyond catastrophic backtracking
Verdict
Event narrative
Risk: low
Advice
Schema compliance
tools/list structure, inputSchema validity, and a functional smoke test — the components of the 0-100 score.
- tools/list schema valid
- inputSchema is valid JSON Schema
- Smoke test not run this round
- Cold-start: cold 178ms → warm 167ms (penalty 11ms)
Tools
Tools the server advertised in the latest measurement — measured, not catalog-claimed.
explain_regexExplain a regular expression in plain English and detect the failure modes that make patterns dangerous rather than merely wrong. Use this whenever a regex needs to be read, reviewed, or verified — and ALWAYS before putting a pattern somewhere it will run against untrusted input. The critical check is catastrophic backtracking: a pattern like (a+)+$ is three characters longer than a safe equivalent, looks harmless, and takes minutes of CPU on a 30-character input that almost matches. That makes it a denial-of-service vector. Whether a pattern is vulnerable depends on whether nested quantifiers can match the same characters in more than one way, which is a structural property that is unreliable to judge by reading. It also flags: missing anchors (an unanchored validator accepts any string
patternstringrequired
Availability history
Event log
Derived by comparing consecutive probes — changes in era, protocol version, build and reachability.
- Added to watch — era: Dual-era
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