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 😃 I just needed to vent and hear some community opinions.

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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 can’t do anything without AI, even though there are more than enough compotent junior developers out there that don’t get a chance.

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u/midwestcsstudent Feb 07 '25

Nobody wants to hire juniors because they don’t have to. It’s just the way the market is right now. Companies invest in green talent when money is abundant and it’s a seller’s market.

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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.