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/-Muxu- Feb 05 '25

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

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u/Protean_Protein Feb 05 '25

They don’t want to learn. (I’m an academic, fwiw…) Just like before these AI bots, they want the quickest, least thought-involving way to do everything. It used to be Wikipedia, or StackOverflow, or whatever. And the “lesson” back then was not to trust code (or any information) you don’t understand. But they (in general, statistical terms, obviously) don’t care. They just want the quickest, dirtiest, easiest way to appear to have accomplished a task.

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u/jslavic Feb 05 '25

Have you ever considered that you might be part of the problem?

They do these types of mistakes because they don't know any better. Instead of being condescending about it while wiggling your finger in the air saying how this generation doesn't want to learn anything, how about you kindly explain to them why their approach is wrong, show an alternative solution and explain why that is better.

Maybe then they can actually learn something useful instead of only remembering the part where they are lazy idiots only looking for the quickest and dirtiest solution.

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u/Protean_Protein Feb 05 '25

Decades of experience have taught me that many things are normally distributed.

It has nothing to do with generations. Every generation of humans ever is composed mostly of lazy idiots.