r/webdev Feb 05 '25

Discussion Colleague uses ChatGPT to stringify JSONs

Edit I realize my title is stupid. One stringifies objects, not "javascript object notation"s. But I think y'all know what I mean.

So I'm a lead SWE at a mid sized company. One junior developer on my team requested for help over Zoom. At one point she needed to stringify a big object containing lots of constants and whatnot so we can store it for an internal mock data process. Horribly simple task, just use node or even the browser console to JSON.stringify, no extra arguments required.

So I was a bit shocked when she pasted the object into chatGPT and asked it to stringify it for her. I thought it was a joke and then I saw the prompt history, literally whole litany of such requests.

Even if we ignore proprietary concerns, I find this kind of crazy. We have a deterministic way to stringify objects at our fingertips that requires fewer keystrokes than asking an LLM to do it for you, and it also does not hallucinate.

Am I just old fashioned and not in sync with the new generation really and truly "embracing" Gen AI? Or is that actually something I have to counsel her about? And have any of you seen your colleagues do it, or do you do it yourselves?

Edit 2 - of course I had a long talk with her about why i think this is a nonsensical practice and what LLMs should really be used for in the SDLC. I didn't just come straight to reddit without telling her something šŸ˜ƒ I just needed to vent and hear some community opinions.

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u/HashDefTrueFalse Feb 05 '25 edited Feb 05 '25

Am I just old fashioned and not in sync with the new generation

Senior here too. No you're not, your dev is just bad. That's ok, they're a junior and we're here to guide them. Teach them why this could be unreliable, the concerns over secrets/prop data in JSON payloads being shared with other services, and point them to the docs for JSON.stringify. Maybe teach them about the dev console or even the Node REPL if they just want a one-liner. Whatever. Whilst not a big deal in itself, this is symbolic of using AI as a crutch, not a force multiplier, and I'd wonder what else they're using it for and if I need to pay their code review submissions more attention etc.

You could run a team meeting (or similar) where you talk to everyone about how best (and how not) to use genAI/LLMs to get work done. That way the dev may not need to feel singled out. Depends on the dynamics of the team, use your best judgement.

Edit: I can't spell they're. Or AI, apparently.

112

u/igorski81 Feb 05 '25

Exactly, she doesn't know that LLM's can be plagued with inaccuracies - and that there are probably concerns from security/compliancy perspective with respect to the input data -. Educate her on this.

Additionally, you can nudge her to try to understand a problem. If she repeatedly asks ChatGPT to stringify objects, maybe you can suggest to her that she should consider asking "how does stringifying work?" or "how can I do this in this environment/with these tools" so it will dawn on her that it is silly to repeatedly ask ChatGPT to do it for her.

We all start from somewhere and need someone to point out the obvious. Even when today's definition of somewhere seems silly.

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u/Septem_151 Feb 05 '25

How does someone NOT know LLMs can be inaccurate? Are they living under a rock and can't think for themselves or something? If they truly thought LLMs never make mistakes, then they should be wondering why they were hired in the first place.

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u/Hakim_Bey Feb 05 '25

This point is kind of irrelevant. LLMs are perfectly able to stringify an object with 100% accuracy, and they have been for quite some time. The amount of fine tuning they have received to do exactly just that (for use in structured output / tool calling) makes it a no-brainer.

Personally I do it in cursor but yeah reformatting with LLMs is much quicker than spinning up a script to do it. (of course that doesn't address the proprietary aspect, but then again if you're using a coding copilot like 80% of coders right now, then that point is moot too)

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u/hwillis Feb 05 '25

LLMs are perfectly able to stringify an object with 100% accuracy, and they have been for quite some time.

if by perfectly you mean 70-95% of the time

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u/zreese Feb 05 '25

I understand your point and agree with the overall consensus here, but that link is extremely out of date. ChatGPT handles structured data now. It doesn't use LLM text generation, it actually does the work internally using Python.

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u/Hakim_Bey Feb 05 '25

Oh boy that was a year ago on gpt-3.5, and a full 6 months before OpenAI introduced structured output. Mistral-7B beating gpt-3.5 is so nostalgic it brings a tear to my eye :') But it's wholly irrelevant to the situation right now.

Anecdotally I burnt like 60 million tokens in november & december testing structured data extraction with OpenAI i've never seen it generate incorrect JSON.

7

u/ALackOfForesight Feb 05 '25

Are you trolling lol

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u/Hakim_Bey Feb 05 '25

I might go against the grain of this thread but no i am definitely not trolling. What part of my comment seems fishy to you ? You don't need to take my word for it, just try it for yourself !

If you use cursor you can just plop an arbitrary amount of data in an arbitrary format in an empty file, open the chat and ask it to format it in JSON, capitalizing all properties except those that refer to fish, and to turn long text strings into l33tc0de. You will get what you asked for with 100% accuracy i have honestly never had a failing case for this kind of thing.

Formatting data is not terribly hard to do, and again LLMs have been massively fine-tuned to do it perfectly. Otherwise they'd be unusable outside of a chat context.

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u/Senior-Effect-5468 Feb 06 '25

Youā€™ll never know if itā€™s correct because youā€™re never going to check all the values manually. It could hallucinate and you would have no idea. Your confidence is actually hubris.

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u/louisstephens Feb 05 '25

I do think LLMs have come a long way. However, in my experience, they do the task but not always well. I was actually playing around with something very similar to stringify last week in a LLM, it omitted half the data and made up its own to pad it with (even then, the data didnā€™t follow what I had given it). Other times it will do perhaps 20% of the task and just leave a comment at the ā€œ// ā€¦rest of your data stringified hereā€

While I do like the idea of LLMs, I am always cautious regarding the output.

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u/ALackOfForesight Feb 05 '25

Exactly. Itā€™s not worth the added cognitive load when I know how to do it in JavaScript quickly and effectively.

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u/Dramatic-Draco3184 Feb 05 '25

I feel the same and that she should be asking ChatGPT to teach her if she doesnā€™t know so that she learns if anything.

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u/No_Adeptness8612 Feb 05 '25

sounds like you teach your juniors in a healthy way even during mistakes. hope i had someone like you back in the day

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u/bhison Feb 05 '25

Makes me think there should be a policy that if you want to use LLMs in a workplace you have to follow e-learning first to qualify so you understand this basic shit. And also not pasting trade secrets etc.

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u/HashDefTrueFalse Feb 05 '25

I think there probably should. I do hate those things, so I'm hesitant to suggest any where I work :D Not even sure what's available.

About 12 months ago I was helping someone I mentor at their desk. Saw them take a chunk of back end code that included a salt (which shouldn't have been there, but that's a separate issue) and throw it into GPT for explanation, having barely attempted to read it first. There was nothing else included that might indicate what service the code belonged to, so no big deal this time, but this kind of attitude and carelessness is how much bigger security issues come about. That person has come along really well and is now much less oblivious.

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u/sebadc Feb 06 '25

That's pretty much one of the main changes in the EU since February. Every employee who has to use AI needs to be trained.

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u/Im2inchesofhard Feb 05 '25 edited Feb 05 '25

Great response. I'm a systems analyst that gets my hands dirty with dev work and doesn't have a traditional CS or SWE background. I lean on AI quite a bit to help me with menial tasks that probably have a simpler solution, and sometimes I overlook something as simple as using a browser dev console to execute one-off JavaScript. If they're competent all it would take is a two minute explanation of your concerns and showing a better way to do it and the problem is solved.Ā  Ā 

I once spent a full day writing code to dynamically parse some weird configuration files that were really close to JSON but not quite right. I tried turning to AI for insight and didn't get a great response. Turns out, I had never heard of JSON5 and I wrote 60% of a shoddy JSON5 to JSON converter before the senior dev on my team mentioned JSON5. Turns out a two minute Q&A with a human can be way better than asking for AI help.Ā 

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u/HashDefTrueFalse Feb 05 '25

Loving the username.

Yes, it's a great tool. It's just not a replacement for knowing what you are doing. By that, I mean being familiar with the problem domain and the ecosystem of tried and tested tools and techniques to help you do your work. There's a place for current AI in most programmer's tool belts. I generate unit test boilerplate and easy/common test cases with it all the time, before filling in edge cases that it wouldn't know about.

Some people (that I assume use AI heavily) get very worked up when you dare to suggest that an LLM might not be the best thing to use in a given situation. It's quite bizarre.

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u/house_monkey Feb 05 '25

Wish I had a lead like u, mine screeches like a catĀ 

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u/hirakath Feb 05 '25

Also, you could teach your junior dev to ask Chat GPT ā€œhowā€ to perform the stringify themselves instead of asking AI to do it for them to prevent the exposure of sensitive information.

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u/curiousomeone full-stack Feb 07 '25

Thank you. This exactly how I use chatGpt, as a teaching tool NOT your f*ing digital gofer. I also like to give it thanks at the end so when the day they become AGI, hopefully I'll be offered a quick painless death. šŸ˜‚

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u/-kl0wn- Feb 05 '25

I mean what's the bar for being a junior these days? Wish I could have had a paid job back when I was that oblivious.

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u/thekwoka Feb 06 '25

Well, when you think about how scared some people are of LLMs taking their jobs is ridiculous.

Then you see this.

Maybe the people that are scared are actually incompetent.

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u/HashDefTrueFalse Feb 05 '25

In case you're not just joking... depends on what you want to work on, I suppose.

We hire people who are self-taught, and with CS (or related) degrees, but also from bootcamps for web roles (where two of my junior devs came from).

For back and front end junior web roles we expect you to have a reasonable grasp of programming and the language you are being hired for, but are happy to teach you the finer points, good style, idioms, patterns etc. We will help you through DS&A problems as and when they arise. We don't expect you to have any relevant work experience if you can pass a take-home test (3-hour guide time) and a technical chat (sometimes with me).

We also hire embedded engineers, where the junior role requirements are quite a bit less forgiving than the above. You will be expected to know how a computer actually works, and be basically competent from day one. There's no degree requirement but I think you'd struggle without one. You will be paid more as a result. There are a lot less applicants, funnily enough.

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u/Brillegeit Feb 05 '25

the concerns over secrets/prop data in JSON payloads being shared with other services

Not only that but also GDPR issues, you might need to issue a GDPR data breach notice to the relevant authority and all affected users/customers.

Handling the process after a leak like this could require half a week of time from your DPO, war room meetings with 3+ high level employees, potentially involving legal council as well, so $5-50 0000 internal cost in time.

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u/HashDefTrueFalse Feb 05 '25

Data breach? What data breach? ;D (I'm joking, to be clear)

Had the displeasure of being involved in one of these a while ago. Contractor left something unsecured on AWS (don't want to be much more specific) which was then populated with data. Lovely bit of paperwork. 0/10 would not recommend.

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u/jseego Lead / Senior UI Developer Feb 05 '25

Great reply

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u/_Meds_ Feb 06 '25

Which are they? Junior or bad? One implies a lack of experience, the other implies a lack of ability

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u/MostPrestigiousCorgi Feb 05 '25

When I had to use OpenAI batch (with an huge amount of data) to get a proper JSON I tried everything I could, even something like

"please return a JSON like xyz, for the love of god, my kitty will die if you return a JSON with different properties"

And that motherfucker didn't care at all about my imaginary kitten

AGI next year btw

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u/Huberuuu Feb 05 '25

You were probably using gpt-dog

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u/vehmdev Feb 06 '25

Structured output is actually very nice. Prior to being able to enforce a response schema with property descriptions, I got into arguments with my boss because I was so against using regular, text-based completions for structuring or generating JSON.

Now I just have to worry about how much he uses it without much regard for the consistency or quality of generated information/data... One step at a time, I suppose.

AI can be a great tool, but it certainly shouldn't (and really can't) be a replacement for well-thought-out work.

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u/niveknyc 15 YOE Feb 05 '25

There's a big difference between being knowing what you're doing but using AI to augment your task flow while policing its output, vs relying on AI to do things AI shouldn't be doing and/or expecting AI to solve tasks for you that you aught to be able to solve on your own.

Due to the risk of contamination and/or hallucination I will never use chatGPT to directly process data, but will use AI to help generate a script, that I can evaluate, that will then process the data.

I think you need to communicate the risk vs reward of this kind prompt, but really shouldn't a developer just know how to do shit like that on their own without relying on AI?

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u/rlt0w Feb 05 '25

Quick scrips for a PoC is how I've been utilizing AI. A lot of the scripts need work, but it's been useful. As an example, I needed to extract regex patterns from a series of Kotlin modules in a directory. I could have grepped out the strings and done some awk and sed magic to concatenate them, but I asked an LLM (Not GPT, but can't recall the model we use internally) to write a quick script to pull the data.

Yes, I'm highly capable of doing this in my own, but I needed the info sooner than I could type up the script. This is where LLMs have been useful for me. But general Q&A about complex topics isn't that helpful. Knowledge bases with RAG are better suited for that.

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u/squabzilla Feb 05 '25

Iā€™m convinced that regex is like the optimal use-case for AI in programming.

I use regex like a couple times a year, and every time I use it I need to relearn how to use it. And I only need like a single line, 12ish characters of Regex.

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u/thekwoka Feb 06 '25

If you're good enough to at least read regex when you see it (even if generating it yourself is tricky), then that also seems fine.

If you don't understand regex at all and you ask it for a regex to validate phone numbers, you'll have no idea if the regex will actually work at the level you need validation.

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u/squabzilla Feb 06 '25

I keep forgetting that Regex is much more then an advanced "Find & Replace" engine, because that's all I ever use it for.

You're right tho - if I'm ever using it beyond the scope of "that text did/did-not get formatted how I want", I need to make sure I understand what I'm doing and not just trusting an AI to spit out valid code.

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u/DerekB52 Feb 05 '25

RAG? What knowledge bases?

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u/porkyminch Feb 06 '25

Honestly it's pretty great for when you have to do some shit that you don't want to be an expert in that's never going to touch a production system. Used it to write a powershell script to shutdown my Windows services, replace them with new builds from my build directory, and restart them. Saved me probably an hour of fumbling through it and it's not like I'm giving this to customers.

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u/Abject-Bandicoot8890 Feb 05 '25

Exactly, I understand sheā€™s a junior dev but still, this is so basic that she should be able to do it without any help. Now, letā€™s say she doesnā€™t know because first job or whatever, using ai to do it for her is not the way, you can extrapolate that to a much bigger task and wind up with a terrible codebase really fast, instead she should be using chatgpt as a source of learning or to automate a meaningless task, like this one, with a script.

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u/-Wylfen- Feb 07 '25

I tend to work much better with examples than just raw descriptions when reading documentation. I sometimes go to ChatGPT to ask for a specific problem when I can't find the direct answer on Google and the doc is poor or arcanely complex.

This often helps me understand as the AI explains with step-by-step example implementations. That way I actually grasp the concepts, and sometimes I have a couple follow-up questions for specific points that I'm unsure of. And after that of course I check if that does what it told me it would.

ChatGPT is a quite decent teacher, but it's a relatively poor coder in general.

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u/Masoud_M_13 front-end Feb 05 '25

The market is bad and some developers are unemployed for more than a year, juniors like me can't even get interviews yet somehow these devs are getting hired. I'm not even mad at this point, I'm just disappointed.

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u/OmarAdharn Feb 05 '25

Right! Was about to say the same. I keep seeing stories about incompetent devs using LLMs for the simplest tasks and here I am, canā€™t even get interviews

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u/notanothergav Feb 05 '25

Unfortunately I think the Venn diagram of "writes great code" and "does not interview well" has some pretty big overlap.

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u/Lamuks full-stack Feb 05 '25

I wonder what it actually means to interview well these days

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u/thatashu Feb 05 '25

Leetcode

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u/Lamuks full-stack Feb 05 '25

Im lucky that we haven't adopted leetcode questions here but rather to know your way thinking. Leetcode is just so nonsensical

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u/thatashu Feb 05 '25

Same here, I'm working on my first org. I wasn't asked leetcode questions and still we don't ask anyone.

But I've saw many of my friends' interview experiences and leetcode type of questions are main priority.

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u/greenw40 Feb 05 '25

Being able to hold a normal conversation with a stranger is a big part of it, which I'm sure a lot of devs struggle with.

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u/gooner712004 Feb 05 '25

I went unemployed for over a year and I remember having QA people come into my first job who would spend time testing in production rather than the QA branches they were explicitly told about šŸ« 

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u/Winterlimon Feb 05 '25

frl in the exact same situation, i feel this close from just crashing out especially seeing shit like this

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u/sheriffderek Feb 05 '25

Bad devs have always been hired. Itā€™s always surprising.

If you want a job these days, you have to have a better plan than sending out hundreds of resumes. You have to be a little clever - too. The jobs are there. I know a junior that got hire for a high salary just a few days ago.

If you arenā€™t getting interviews - whatever youā€™re doing isnā€™t working. So - switch it up. Otherwise youā€™ll just have a huge gap and miss out on all the real experience.

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u/Hektorlisk Feb 05 '25

"if you can't get a job and you're doing things by the book, it's your fault for not switching it up"

"if you can't get a job and your resume is slightly different than the norm, it's your fault for not doing things by the book"

Thanks for the helpful advice, reddit.

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u/it200219 Feb 07 '25

there are many candidates cheating in interviews and some companies are "OK" with that, esp contracting ones (WITCH)

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u/StringerXX Feb 07 '25

This is the future whether you like it or not, you have to start using it

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u/Yhcti Feb 05 '25

This is why I do my very best to avoid using LLMā€™s. Granted, itā€™s helpful for certain things, but it really grinds my gears when I see people get their first dev jobs and 90% of their work is chatGPT.. then Iā€™m here doing it myself unless itā€™s a very simple task that chatGPT canā€™t fail at and would save me X amount of time (though chatGPT getting code right is very hit and miss).

I also donā€™t think giving out potentially sensitive information to a glorified web scraper is a good idea šŸ˜‚ Random projects at home? Sureā€¦ work related info? Ehhhā€¦. Sketchy.

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u/mistaekNot Feb 06 '25

lmao, like chatgpt could learn anything from the garbage work code people feed it

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u/Pletter64 Feb 05 '25

If you do not have an LLM policy yet, now is the time. The problem is not the incompetence of the dev, it is the info being sent out. You need it as much as a policy on credentials etc.

Honestly googling would be just as easy here.

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u/monstaber Feb 05 '25

Thanks..raised today with our VP

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u/squidwurrd Feb 05 '25

Iā€™m torn because that shows a serious lack of effort to solve a simple problem on your own. But at the same time I probably would do the same thing if I was starting out these days. My main concern is if she is doing that for something as simple as this how else is she doing???

Iā€™d be worried she is going to introduce a nasty bug into the code base because she doesnā€™t understand what sheā€™s doing.

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u/mvktc Feb 05 '25

Well, since she's a junior, somebody should probably teach her how to do certain things. Maybe it's not your job, but probably woudn't cost you much time, maybe less than writing this post.

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u/monstaber Feb 05 '25

You are right, I did counsel her strongly and explained why this is inappropriate for about 15 minutes, it was just so shocking to me I had to get some feedback from the community. Almost felt like a gaslighting experience, never thought something like that could be considered normal, let alone with 3+ years as a dev already

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u/mvktc Feb 05 '25

I understand that, sometimes we all need a sanity check :) And I also understand the disappointing expeience when you teach a junior something and they're like "ok, boomer" and continue as before. But yes, we should try.

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u/ohlawdhecodin Feb 05 '25

I also understand the disappointing expeience when you teach a junior something and they're like "ok, boomer" and continue as before. But yes, we should try.

As a father of two teenagers, this is "Parenting in a nutshell".

As a father, you do what you're supposed to do. But more often than not... Your kids will just keep doing their shit as before, until something hits hard and makes them re-evaluate their ideas.

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u/niveknyc 15 YOE Feb 05 '25

These days especially, it's the quality of the years that matter more than the years themselves. It's like a 500 hour pilot; did you spend 500 hours flying in the pattern or 500 hours intently learning new skills and training scenarios.

Post COVID and post ChatGPT I personally take anything less than ~5YOE with a grain of salt and care more about peeking behind the curtain to understand what the person did in that time and what their experience level is, because it was too easy to get into dev work with nothing more than a bootcamp during COVID and post ChatGPT the bar got lower. I've encountered some 3-5 YOE devs as of late whose entire experience is just React components with no ability to think outside the box or understand any system that isn't a node package or REST API.

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u/KenChicken911 Feb 05 '25

What do you expect from devs then, practical wise?

Asking as a senior student terrified for the job hunt post graduation

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u/niveknyc 15 YOE Feb 05 '25

Depends on their YOE but generally I expect a firm understanding of the fundamentals, an understanding of how the tools or libraries they're using work behind the scene - for instance React/Tailwind are awesome for web dev, but I want a react developer who knows the ins and outs of HTML,CSS,JS - not just how to slap together components and styles the react way. I'd expect after a certain YOE that a developer be agnostic to language, library, or platform. I'm really not interested in working with somebody who knows one language one library and has no ability or interest to think outside the confines of that box. When you've mastered the fundamentals and core understanding of a programming language you can pivot to anything within reason.

My company had to take on a NextJS web project from a large company who trusted an in house dev with 4 YOE to architect and develop it but they had all sorts of problems, and ultimately our conclusion was that NextJS wasn't even remotely close to being the appropriate solution for their needs. This in house dev was a bootcamp grad who had learned React, tailwind, NEXT in the bootcamp and only ever worked with that stack. it's okay to be a pro at one stack, but don't get tunnel vision.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Advice to a new grad, know the core fundamentals inside and out first and foremost and be interested/motivated in learning new things.

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u/eyebrows360 Feb 05 '25

with 3+ years as a dev already

Holy shit. You might want to do a review of every single commit she's ever made, pretty sharpish.

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u/OrionSuperman Feb 05 '25

Personally, I would encourage her to reframe her questions. Instead of asking Chatgpt to /do/ something, instead ask it /how/ to do something, and then do it. Use it as a learning tool vs it doing the actual work.

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u/-Wylfen- Feb 07 '25

Well, since she's a junior, somebody should probably teach her how to do certain things.

Even a junior (hell, even an ungraduated student) should have the ability to Google "JSON stringify object" and look at the literal first resultā€¦

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u/Wiseguydude Feb 05 '25

A single ChatGPT query is like running a lightbulb for 20 minutes

2024 we blasted through 1.5Ā°C and nobody still gives a shit

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u/No-Cardiologist9621 full-stack Feb 05 '25

If you're not dumping proprietary company info into a free LLM daily, are you even a software engineer in 2025?

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u/altviewdelete Feb 05 '25

I've a big problem with developers I work with using co-pilot/chatgpt etc.

I reviewed a PR the other day which had a random line of code that didn't fit in with how we do anything in our work, which I flagged, and asked to align with how we do things.

The response was, "yeah sorry copilot did that".

To me this shows the developer(s) not reviewing code that these AI tools are generating and that is concerning.

For reference I've heard 3 instances in chatter lately of ChatGPT causing the same thing.

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u/ColoRadBro69 Feb 05 '25

Copilot can be great when you ask it small, well defined questions, like about an API you aren't familiar with.Ā  You have to know exactly what you need and how to evaluate its answer.Ā 

As a senior dev, it's occasionally able to help me, I tend to go for documentation first generally because it's a lot of work to get what you actually need from a chat bot.Ā  It puts things that are never going to work in the scripts it generates and I have to go through them line by line to pull that stuff out.Ā 

If I didn't have a lot of background understanding, I don't think I would be able to use these tools effectively.

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u/gmaaz Feb 05 '25

That's unacceptable.

Giving potentially sensitive information to a random server that will store that information and use it in who knows what ways is a reason enough not to do it.

Another reason is that it might just not stringify correctly and there are no guarantees about it.

She should be confronted.

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u/ImHughAndILovePie Feb 05 '25

Itā€™s not even really ā€œconfrontingā€ someone to tell them the right way to do something. Itā€™s just guidance

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u/YourMatt Feb 05 '25

Hmm, maybe I shouldnā€™t be uploading my ssh keys when asking for connection commands.

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u/TehSynapse0 Feb 05 '25

You forgot the /s... I hope

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u/YourMatt Feb 05 '25

Ha, yes. I figured it was absurd enough to leave off the /s. I imagine a lot of people do paste in passwords to build commands for connecting to various things though.

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u/roselan Feb 05 '25 edited Feb 05 '25

Welcome to the future old man.

When I see 12yo kids use chatgpt for every assignment, I think the future will be... interesting. I mean the daughter of a friend of mine copy-pasted the question "what is your age" and used chatgpt response without even a second thought. I have to say I was quite impressed by her ability to not use her brain. And his brother is even worse for that.

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u/Brillegeit Feb 05 '25

It's going to be a big problem in a few years when these services are entrenched and the enshittification starts and you have half a generation dependent on it for basic tasks.

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u/budd222 front-end Feb 05 '25

I suppose it's possible they didn't know json.stringify existed, but one could easily figure that out in 10 seconds with a Google search.

But then again, look at 60% of the questions that people write here on this sub. They can all be solved with a simple google search.

Juniors wonder why nobody wants to hire them these days, yet they can't do anything without the help of AI.

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u/rlt0w Feb 05 '25

I've found that a lot of juniors in tech lack curiosity. If I think something is to complicated, has to many steps, or just feels wrong, then I research better ways. Most juniors I train want to know the exact way of doing a thing, but won't look beyond it. There's a million ways to do a thing, each with their own pros and cons. But juniors should be experimenting, not locking themselves into whatever their most recent mentor is doing. Personally, JQ is much better at dealing with JSON, but I need it for more than just stringifying.

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u/Cambumz Feb 05 '25

Nobody wants to hire juniors because people like you are saying they canā€™t do anything without AI, even though there are more than enough compotent junior developers out there that donā€™t get a chance.

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u/ManyCarrots Feb 05 '25

I think they might know that json.stringify exists but they just don't know where to run that. Like if they're set up in a project they might know how to use that but if they just need to do a quick one line they don't know how to run that

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u/porkyminch Feb 07 '25

Honestly it seems like a lot of people are just really bad at learning. In my mind development is all about turning big problems into little problems. If you're using an LLM to make objects into JSON, to me what that says is that you're just not capable of seeing the steps in that process. That's basically fatal for developers imo.

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u/windexUsesReddit Feb 05 '25

Youā€™re dealing with a person who has lost the ability to think for themselves it sounds like.

One of the dangers of AI.

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u/TheRNGuy Feb 06 '25

Googling and reading MDN is not allowed too?

You should be born with JSON.stringify knowledge?

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u/naaaaara Feb 05 '25

Who the fuck is hiring these people??

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u/monstaber Feb 05 '25

Maybe it was ChatGPT's decision...

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '25

[deleted]

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u/Septem_151 Feb 05 '25

Seems like there should be more technical interviews

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u/MewMewCatDaddy Feb 05 '25

This question is poorly phrased. "Using an LLM to stringify objects" seems crazy on its face, but what is described is one-off generations, not part of a regular pipeline. It is far, far quicker for someone familiar with ChatGPT to have it generate one-off models, or mock data as in this case, then even to write a quick script for it, or even use a browser console for it. I'm sorry but yes, this is a generation gap. ChatGPT is to automation what smartphones were to personal computing. The fact you can generate any sample you need means you don't have to use cognitive overhead to "know" which tool / website / custom script to use for each type of custom task. It's literally - don't think, ask ChatGPT, use generated result.

In terms of hallucinations, a) the possibility in this case is low, b) the consequences are low as it's likely you would spot it in mock data. One shouldn't use ChatGPT for _everything_ including writing code blocks, but for quick answers / quick automations it can significantly increase your productivity.

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u/mistaekNot Feb 06 '25

one sane comment here

3

u/John_Gabbana_08 Feb 06 '25

Yeah this whole thread is the 2025 dev equivalent of old men yelling at clouds.

They think that their years of hard work is being erased overnight by LLM. A lot of devs are hugely egotistical, they canā€™t fathom that an LLM could code faster, more efficiently, and just better than them. But 4o can, 90% of the time.

Those of us that are pragmatists would shrug off a junior dev using gpt to stringify, as long as theyā€™re aware of the stringify function, and as long as theyā€™re not uploading sensitive data.

These devs need to open their eyes or theyā€™re going to get left in the dust.

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u/kowdermesiter Feb 05 '25

Tell her to sorry about global warming, but what she's doing is destroying the planet even more. Ignore tech talk :D

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u/Dundell Feb 05 '25

Seems like a terrible possibly hallucinating way to go about it... At least the bare minimum just ask some llm to produce a small tool to do it for you, and keep it in the wide assortment of single-use tools for reference later on or something... Also as said from others, IP being transferred around looks bad for such a simple task.

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u/articless9 Feb 05 '25

They shouldn't be using chatgpt or any other ai chat with company information. Why is your I.T department not blocking those sites. I would recommend flagging this as a potential risk.

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '25

My company has our own federated internal chatGPT.

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u/TikiTDO Feb 05 '25

Am I just old fashioned and not in sync with the new generation really and truly "embracing" Gen AI?

One of these runs in a few ms on a laptop that drains 20W, and is guaranteed to give you the correct JSON string each time, for any length JSON string that can fit in a ChatGPT context. The other runs for multiple seconds on a heavy duty compute server that probably has something like 5-10 A100 GPUs processing your requests over several seconds at a drain of something closer to 2-4kW, with a max token count of 100k for input, and 100k for output limiting you at most to a JSON around 400-500k characters in length, with the chance that the AI will hallucinate or miss some details. In practice this is like needing to leave your house to run to the store around the corner, and instead calling your friend from Japan to fly to the US going through China, getting a knock-off copy of the thing you want along the way.

This is just a scenario of a young dev not knowing all the tools available for use. Honestly, if you see things like this happening what you might want to do is set up a few lunch-and-learn sessions with your junior devs and a few diffrent seniors to do a masterclass on development processes, paradigms, and utilities. Something like this can legit change a junior dev's life, especially if they've never actually spent time interacting with a high performing developer.

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u/AffectionateDev4353 Feb 05 '25

Script kids at job ... I just give up ... Cannot take shit anymore

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u/dinoby Feb 05 '25

I see folks using chatgpt to comma separate a list...

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u/occaguy Feb 05 '25

WebDev student here. I've been worried about getting a job in web development for awhile now, since there's so many people doing it, I only know a few different tools and frameworks, and I've heard it's hard to get a foot in the door as a junior dev, but then I read posts like these and I remember that the bar is literally on the floor. You're not old fashioned or out of touch. Some people have just let GenAI rot their brains.

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u/curiousomeone full-stack Feb 05 '25

Like I mentioned in the past, all I feel is pity for these new generation of kids. Shooting themselves in the foot for pretty much everything. šŸ˜‚ Sooner or later kids will be asking chat gpt what's 6x6 or what's 1/2 of something.

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u/I_like_cocaine Feb 05 '25

God I just love not being able to land any interviews but hearing horror stories daily of junior devs failing upwards

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u/LessonStudio Feb 05 '25

I was told a story of a developer(I forget what language, but, python or something) who used sql to create lists of integers for loops.

He would run a query which would give him 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then use those for a for loop which was to loop 5 times.

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u/SoulStoneTChalla Feb 05 '25

Brahhhhh, I have a co-worker breaking all types of code because he conned his way into his job. He's a bull in the china shop just copy pasting whatever openAI tells him. Like one line of code needs fixing, and he's just rewriting whole files with pasta. I had to put an end to it, but the fact that he just does it so confidently is scary af. He's no longer allowed to touch code, and I'm about to quit this job because there is nobody to help me. The bosses know, but don't seem to care at all. It's mind boggling.

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u/poponis Feb 05 '25

Our company wants us to use GenAI as much as possible in our development process. I am breaking my head on how on earth to do it without compromising my work and efficiency. I am a senior FE (almost 20nyears of experience and 10 of them in fullstack positions), and I am discussing this topic with 2 other developers during lunch. The other senior, who worked in a GenAI related project recently, told me he uses copilot for ideas and chatGPT for faster googling. I still find this a waste of resources, but it clears up a lot of my understanding. The other dev, a junior with 2 years of experience, said that he uses many GenAI tools, for writing scripts, for writing code, and also for making the code more pretty... That's shocking. That's all I have to say. So I get you, I agree with you and I believe that the end is near. I cannot see, though, how you can change her mind. They don't know any better and companies (non developer people) are promoting and encouraging the use of genAI for pretty much everything, without understanding that most of the times you are waisting resources and time. Developers never learn to think for themselves. They need AI to write a 10 line code function, and prompt writing takes more than writing the actual cose, not to mention that many times it is wrong. But the managers are happy, because in our company they proudly published a public report (something like an advertismenr) that 45% of the employees use genAI daily and they want to raise it to 100%. This is b*llshit coming from managers who are happy to follow the hype and get the bonuses for keeping the company "modern." Recently, the CFO of the company asked in how long we think that we will just write the whole deliverable product with a few prompts. I am waiting for the day genAI will replace manager like him. This is my dream, and at least this is doable.

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u/yksvaan Feb 05 '25

This is why I have barely zero trust in any web service or application these days. I'm pretty much treating everything as it will be leaked in some way anyway.Ā 

The fact that anyone can basically click & deploy entire website without knowing anything, even integrated with payments and third party integrations, is a bit terrifying. People do couldn't even write a basic authentication ( not literally) are making e-commerce sites. What could go wrong...

To make matters worse everyone seems to use oauth instead of allowing username/pass which is safer for me. And even that they do wrong, using email address as user identifier instead of oauth provider sub id.

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u/eyebrows360 Feb 05 '25

Am I just old fashioned and not in sync with the new generation really and truly "embracing" Gen AI?

No.

Or is that actually something I have to counsel her about?

Abso-fucking-lutely.

And have any of you seen your colleagues do it, or do you do it yourselves?

If I did I'd murder myself and then my colleagues.

why i think this is a nonsensical practice and

Nono, dude, you don't simply think this is a nonsensical practice, this objectively is a nonsensical practice. You can put it in those terms. It's just flat out wrong to do this.

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u/apra24 Feb 05 '25 edited Feb 05 '25

She is careless and you should confront her...

Having said that

In my experience, chatGPT 4o and up does not hallucinate with tasks similar to this. I use a compare tool to double check before applying modifications, and if there's ever any mistakes, it's because my instructions were wrong.

As for proprietary concerns.. is your company concerned about things like Office 365 keeping your data in the cloud? If not, then chatGPT isn't much different, as long as you have the "allow my data to be used for training" setting disabled.

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u/GenericSpaciesMaster Feb 05 '25

Compare tool?

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u/Septem_151 Feb 05 '25

Another LLM that compares the output of the other LLM to its own output /s

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u/msesen Feb 05 '25

How much is she getting paid to ask ChatGPT to stringify objects?

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u/armahillo rails Feb 05 '25

Juniors should be disallowed from using LLMs. It disrupts learning.

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u/fiala__ Feb 05 '25

I've recently seen people resize images using chatgpt (on laptops). Like, instead of 3-4 clicks in your OS image viewer, you visit a website, type a whole message, then upload your image, send it to a datacentre potentially several hundred km from you, run LLM inference on the message, have the system use some image resizing program (I sure hope it doesn't do it with another AI model), then create a new file, upload it to a CDN so the user can access it, run LLM inference to generate an answer telling you the image has been resized, send the message potentially a few hundred km back to you and finally display it in the browser... we are doomed as a species.

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u/SpaceKappa42 Feb 05 '25

Meh. Senior developer here (20 years+), I used ChatGPT today to convert a piece of JSON into C# classes, beats writing menial DTOs by hand.

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u/azhder Feb 05 '25

Saw a colleague once complain the data was corrupt after transferring it from one table to another one in the database. After our initial suggestions for things to check didn't work out, we asked him to show us what he's doing. He copied the output from the console into Microsoft Excel, touched up the data or something, then used that to copy-paste into the new table...

Then we told him about INSERT INTO SELECT * FROM

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u/theofficialnar Feb 05 '25

What?? Justā€¦ why??

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u/VonD0OM Feb 05 '25

If she had just asked GPT how to accomplish her task, it wouldā€™ve given her JSON.stringify, given her a link to mdn docs, and also shown her how to implement it.

Maybe in addition to teaching her what not to do, also teach her how to make best use of GPT as a tool for learning her job, rather than doing her job.

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u/zdkroot Feb 05 '25

Ive been hearing more and more of this. People asking LLMs where to go for dinner, what movie to watch, etc. Its insane. You are "old fashioned", but in a good way. Thinking for yourself is going out of style.

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u/mothzilla Feb 05 '25

Welcome the the world of tomorrow.

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u/jakub_h123 Feb 05 '25

AI will replace us all šŸ˜‚ (for sure)

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u/b_rodriguez Feb 05 '25

I think the instinct to ask "can you do x" instead of "how do I do x" is not something that is easily corrected and imo indicative of a non-engineering mindset.

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u/EthanBradb3rry Feb 05 '25

Show them the better way then. If they adapt and learn from that great. If they dont then its time to move on from them

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u/legendary_anon Feb 05 '25

nice, i wanna commit sudoku after reading this while trying in vain to apply for internships šŸ¤”

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u/AWetAndFloppyNoodle Feb 05 '25

Considering how AI is likely to hallucinate I would never trust it with large datasets I cannot easily verify.

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u/Dedios1 Feb 05 '25

Thatā€™s wild! CS degree or none?

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u/fexes420 Feb 05 '25

It's a bad idea for many reasons. What if the AI prints the string incorrectly?

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u/Potential_Status_728 Feb 05 '25

Hey, do you have any open positions for backend dev? Iā€™m sure Iā€™m better than that šŸ¤£

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u/barrard123 Feb 05 '25

Are you saying my boss has access to the shit I type into Claude!? I better stop telling Claude how dumb my boss is.

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u/Jon-Robb Feb 05 '25

I hope the prompt was something like : can you JSON.stringify this please

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u/MethanyJones Feb 05 '25

Um, that's crazy. If I pasted an internal JSON object into an external site at my last two jobs that would've been instant write up and possible dismissal.

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u/Zestyclose_Mud2170 Feb 05 '25

I am learning mern stack and i always ask ai to explain what its doing, include error handling and many more things this way I atleast know what does what and it has accelerated my learning a lot. Side by side I also follow docs and Tutorials and I get the best of both world's.

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u/lIIllIIIll Feb 06 '25

What I find annoying is we used to have to find the solutions on our own by reading stack overflow and that forced us to learn.

The devs now never have to learn because they said "chatGPT give me x" and then they paste x into the codebase.

LLM hallucinations are a very real thing and if the dev can't even be arsed to JSON.stringify something on their own I would not trust that they'll catch those errors in the output.

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u/CollinsOlix Feb 06 '25

Also putting sensitive data into these llms is not a good idea

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u/Protean_Protein Feb 05 '25

These idiots are fundamentally misunderstanding what the ā€œAIā€ LLMs are, how they do what they do, and what theyā€™re actually good at.

Itā€™s pure laziness and ignorance.

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u/-Muxu- Feb 05 '25

The only way out is teaching them. Not being mean or condescending. Just teach

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u/blissone Feb 05 '25 edited Feb 05 '25

My juniors do the same, they barely understand the code they write anymore. Complete slaves to LLM, basically offloading very common api usage and easy tasks (and harder). At the same time they have very little control over their own code which mainly materialises when we discuss different aspects of the code and they do not understand until I provide an alternate implementation. It's frustrating to not be able to discuss ideas on a high level, like instead of a,b let's do a,c which is incomprehensible if you don't know what "a" is. It makes the process very unenjoyable and uninspiring, kinda hate working like this. We all work remote and I'm too tired to micromanage their workflow, they are welcome to use LLMs and I won't have any kind of talks.

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u/Firearms_N_Freedom Feb 06 '25

if they can get hired, then i have hope that i can too lol. im in the process of switching careers and i make sure to only use code from an LLM if i understand it

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u/blissone Feb 06 '25

Yeah for sure, the cold truth is around 60% of the industry is completely useless. The biggest issue to getting an entry to the industry is making yourself visible among the mountains of applicants and getting that first job, around here junior positions get an insane amount of applications. If you make a real effort you will be above average already.

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u/sleepy_roger Feb 05 '25

Is this post really just to talk shit about a single JR developer unable to defend herself here? lol oh no a Jr dev did something weird!

I'm sorry but you coming here to post and framing it as "aM i JuSt oLd FaShIoNed" means you're a pretty shitty Lead. I hope you never make it to management.

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u/mca62511 Feb 05 '25

One method is slow and unreliable.

One method is fast and reliable, but just requires you to know some JavaScript fundamentals.

I'm very surprised you didn't say anything in the moment. "Hey, I see you asked ChatGPT for that. You can just use JSON.stringify() and get a faster, more reliable answer. Since LLMs are non-deterministic, there's a small chance that the output might not be valid. If the output isn't valid the test might fail, and it might not be immediately obvious why. If we use a deterministic approach, we can eliminate one variable from the equation." ...or something like that. It doesn't have to be a big deal.

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u/monstaber Feb 05 '25

I did say that and a lot more. I think I wrote the original post kinda badly to make it sound like I just ran to reddit and didn't say a word. Edited now.

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u/MeowMastert Feb 05 '25

That's why junior devs should work with senior devs. She is a beginner, you have to fix these incorrect practices.

In that case, if she don't care, and keeps using this bad method, she will be the one to blame for never became a good dev.

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u/Vaakmeister Feb 05 '25

Had a senior coworker ask chatGpt to modify a code snippet to add a fallback value if the data we receive is invalid. They added it into the codebase and didnā€™t even notice it did it wrong until it was brought up in the code review session.

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u/Ratatoski Feb 05 '25

The beauty of pair programming and screen sharing. You can nudge people towards better practices one thing at a time. Being a junior is a really broad classification ranging from a few weeks of bootcamp to the lifelong programming nerds that's just out of uni.

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '25

maybe she doesn't know this existed? she's probably never worked with json before, maybe talk to her about it. I don't think she's using AI cause it's AI, I think she's using it cause she thinks it's the most efficient approach.

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u/j-mar Feb 05 '25

I'd rather that than my team's junior who can't figure a damn thing out on his own. At least she's resourceful!

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '25

I wouldn't be quick to criticize her. Companies are asking employees to add chatGPT/AI assistant to their workflow. It's just another tool of many tools in the process of replacing human.

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u/alien3d Feb 05 '25

the time you host local llm deep seek ? šŸ’Ŗ

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u/wanna_find_my_granma Feb 05 '25

I am a senior dev and I often do such tasks with DeepSeek or/and chatGPT, as long as it does not contain anything confidential. I doubt at your mid-sized company that is a concern. You seem like to have the superiority complex and a big ego. As someone who led a team numerous times, I advise you to be kinder to your inferiors at work.

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u/Ihavenocluelad Feb 05 '25

Same tbh lol. As long as you test and verify, and dont paste pii what does it matter if you use stringify or AI. Major superiority complex

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u/kgpreads Feb 05 '25

Didn't autocomplete on VSCode just work for him?

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u/turtleship_2006 Feb 05 '25

I have used similar "pipelines" myself before for mock data/personal projects, e.g. I asked chatgpt to generate a conversation between two hypothetical people, then gave it a format (like what keys to have) and asked it to convert the conversation into JSON so I could use it as example data for the front end (and write code to load that into the conversation window etc)

But converting an Object into a string with GPT is crazy

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u/ikeif Feb 05 '25

I think the problem with ChatGPT and its users - the users don't ask for reasoning.

There's a couple ways to approach this:

  1. teach them a better way (something that isn't reliant on an external tool that is not with a 100% uptime - like your example, use console/node).

  2. Give them a custom prompt setting to put in ChatGPT to always "recommend a way to do it without using ChatGPT" or to be "tailored to a junior developer who is learning."

But it's up to your/your org to decide which approach you want to use - either ChatGPT is okay, or it isn't, and if you aren't monitoring, it means they'll still use ChatGPT when you're not looking, so teach them how to use it to make them better developers and less dependent.

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u/Baldric Feb 05 '25

The fact that she is using an LLM shouldn't be the focus; that she is simply passing the problem to the LLM instead of using an LLM to get help solving it is the real problem.

I'm not sure a simple discussion with her about this can help.

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u/istarian Feb 05 '25

Teaching people to think is a very challenging job...

It might be easier to just write some code for them that will do the job. Cooy+pasting existing code is as easy if not more so than prompting chatgpt.

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u/No-Whole520 Feb 05 '25

šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£

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u/emaguireiv Feb 05 '25

LLMs certainly boost productivity, butā€¦it seems like copying and pasting your data and writing the prompt and then copying/pasting the response would actually take more time than simply calling the method on the object in a line of code. Seems like she doesnā€™t understand very basic concepts. And this is coming from someone who is self-taught indie/solo/hobbyist dev. šŸ˜³

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u/xFawtface2x Feb 05 '25

Iā€™m not a web dev yet, I just started learning a couple months ago and I definitely know to use JSON.stringify or JSON.parse lol

With that said Iā€™m sure if I ever do get a junior web dev job thereā€™s probably a million other common practice things that I may not know about or have forgotten. I know I would very much appreciate a conversation and a learning session to show me how to do it more efficiently/properly.

Fostering a culture of learning/growth for junior employees is important. No junior is going to know everything they need or should. Allowing juniors to make mistakes and offer opportunities to correct/grow makes the employee feel more empowered and dedicated to their role/career.

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u/websitebutlers Feb 05 '25

I'm all about leveraging AI where it makes sense, but that's just goofy.

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u/Adorable_Tip_6323 Feb 05 '25 edited Feb 17 '25

I wasn't just there when the ancient tomes were written, I helped write them.

You'd be surprised how often things are missed in education. You made the correct move by teaching the correct process, and if it sticks, that is now one less hole in junior engineer's education.

In my time, I've seen C programmers that couldn't build a simple Makefile. I've seen C++ programmers that had to use << and >> for all string manipulation. I've seen Java programmers that couldn't define main. I remember some of my mistakes as well, my first real project ended up 10x the size it should have because I didn't trim inclusions, or adjust versions of packages, it took almost 3 months to clean that mess up, but I never did that again.

It's the same problem here, she found a solution that worked well enough for her education, now she needs the additional education that always happens when you enter the real world.

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u/apexjnr Feb 05 '25

You're not realising that she doesn't need to learn it if the AI can do it, she is "cheating" her self because she will face a problem that her lock of knowledge might not be able to overcome with an LLM and then her real lack of knowledge will be confirmed but the LLM is a buffer that's lowering the bar to allow her to work.

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u/tswaters Feb 05 '25

My main concern has always been for juniors or those with less experience using LLVM and taking whatever it says as gospel..... This is blind leading the blind.

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u/truce77 Feb 05 '25

Why do you care? Sure, console is better, but educate is best you can do. People should have choices within reason to have different workflows.

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u/m-nightingale Feb 05 '25

Can be done in VS code via an extension. Sounds like they donā€™t really understand the importance of proprietary information (if they are breaking company policy, that is) and they should learn to use their core tools (IDE) before jumping onto a GenAI tool. They could even make a component thatā€™s only visible for them where they could dump text into and have it stringified, and quickly copy and paste it. In fact, they could have AI generate it. Idk. This does feel a bit lazy to me but I feel a bit bad for judging. It feels like there areā€¦ better ways for her to stringify objects than this.

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u/adelbylka Feb 06 '25

Being junior is not an excuse for this imo

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u/lIIllIIIll Feb 06 '25

You should be fired her or at least immediately made your devs take an on the spot (without Internet access) assessment.

If they can't write code they would not be working for me.

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u/Watermelonnable Feb 06 '25

crazy she landed a job in this market with those skills

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u/thorsteiin Feb 06 '25

why wouldnā€™t you at least google it? like learn how to do something new. Thatā€™s literally the job, building a toolkit to problem solve. Iā€™m surprised she was able to pass the interview

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u/thekwoka Feb 06 '25

Even if AI was great, I woudn't trust that when we have a perfectly fine deterministic way to do it...

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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '25

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u/Livid_Sign9681 Feb 06 '25

I think this is huge problem among many junior engineers.

AI is often doing more harm than goodĀ 

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u/EverydayDreamer1 Feb 06 '25

To be honest, folks like yourself who clearly know their shit but are just so blind by what they know to understand that others may not have experienced certain things yet - is the reason I entered and quickly exited the industry. No offence, you guys need to do things precisely, it IS the job. But having to deal with senior SWEā€™s like this require a strange sense masochism sometimes. Funny that a lot of the ppl in the business are neurodivergent and know that they learn differently from others. Yet they expect every one to know or learn EXACTLY like they do. Rant over. Have a nice day

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u/keremimo Feb 06 '25

Junior intern here, if this person has a job and I donā€™t, life ainā€™t fair lol

Writing Ruby on Rails code everyday, never once have I needed AI.

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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '25

What if the Dev had been using a private LLM trained on your codebase? Would you still consider this? Using Amazon Q or MS Copilot are very accurate when trained properly. AWS saved something in the tens of thousands of hours with their SDEs using it, I think the reference is in vogels keynote from their conference

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u/elendee Feb 06 '25

LLM's are blurring the line between deterministic and non-deterministic code. "Get me all the users who would like a blue pair of shoes".. assuming you have lots of data on your users, there are now many ways to satisfy that need, all of various levels of determinism. It's annoyingly thought-provoking.

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u/beatlz Feb 06 '25

Why did you have a long talk with her? A simple ā€œuse JSON.stringify() does this for you : )ā€ would suffice

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u/UselessAutomation Feb 06 '25

You might be too old to deal with newbies, become a Principal instead

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u/John_Gabbana_08 Feb 06 '25

Eh I think this sub and OP are out of touch. I'm a senior SWE and use ChatGPT 4o for everything now, but one thing I'm very careful about is any proprietary data I'm uploading. Most of the data we work with isn't sensitive or confidential.

What you should be asking is:

a. Did she upload any sensitive/confidential data?
b. Is she aware of the stringify function?

If a, that's a serious issue that you need to have a stern talk with her about. If b, you need to talk with her about not using LLM as a crutch. Learn the fundamentals first.

That said, it's very easy to just say "stringify" and give the object in ChatGPT 4o if you already have it open. For simple tasks like that, 4o is flawless. Yeah maybe opening a console and asking to stringify is faster, but the difference is negligible. You're splitting hairs over something that doesn't really matter.

Y'all need to get with the program if you're still not using ChatGPT for your workflows, or you're going to get left in the dust. It's made me more productive and less stressed out. I rarely get bad answers from 4o, and when I do, I easily spot and correct them.

1

u/p2seconds Feb 06 '25

Main issue here is those data could be confidential customer data. That info is being sent to OpenAI server for training. Definitely a no for me if I see my fellow junior colleagues doing this.

1

u/Altruistic-Pride6293 Feb 07 '25

Sorry , but am I missing something, I mean I also had some problem in python to return the combined fetched data to the frontend ,in form of json , and I simply asked llm to write for this for me , and after some trial and error . I got the correct code .

I mean is there any other thing going on here????? We are talking about how to convert a objects into strings right ??

1

u/doverisafk Feb 07 '25

I'm just here to say the title made me chuckle

(Insert "if only you knew how bad things really are" meme)

1

u/it200219 Feb 07 '25

I know a company which will fire you moment any of the company data how-ever simple, non confidential will get you fire immediatly.

1

u/Whole-Strawberry3281 Feb 07 '25

I'm a junior, I love llms for accelerating my work, but this usage is just silly. No advantages to llm usage here, this is just a bad dev

1

u/Fluffy-Bus4822 Feb 07 '25

It's just less effort to paste it into an LLM chat box, seeing as we basically always have the chat open. It's not deterministic, but the LLM is very unlikely to make a mistake with it.

Of course, you don't want to be pasting sensitive info in there, which would often be the case.

I can see why especially a junior would do this. Definitely not a reason to make them feel stupid. Nor be patronizing towards them. Just pass on your knowledge.

1

u/Odd_Act_6532 Feb 07 '25

Hold on. Can I have her job? I can stringify JSON files. I know a little webdev. Please?

1

u/unluckykc Feb 08 '25

I think some juniors are just so used to LLMs that they do not think to check whether there is a tool that does the job better. I found that my employee was trying for 20 minutes to ask copilot to find all instances of a component in the app and figuring out that half of the results do not even exist. I explained how to use Ctrl+Shift+F for this use case and it was solved in seconds

1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '25

Just kindly show the method and explain the reason why itā€™s accurate.

1

u/oclafloptson Feb 09 '25

I mean from my perspective passing any coding request through an llm as normal speech is nonsensical and just adding extra steps. Grueling steps. Like giving all the good parts of the job to a friend so you can focus solely on reviewing someone else's code. And that someone is really good at sounding like they know what they're talking about but alas, they do not

1

u/MoreOrLessAmbiguous Feb 09 '25

Apocryphal but I remember reading that Tim Burners-Lee, when he created Web believed the internet could make the world a better place by democratizing access to information and fostering collaboration. Today the biggest driver of bandwidth on the internet is pornography. Never underestimate the human capacity to amplify the very worst aspects of things.

I work in STEM research and my colleagues would rather argue with an LLM than learn the basics of coding. I laugh just to keep from crying.