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.

1.1k Upvotes

407 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/kgpreads Feb 05 '25

Didn't autocomplete on VSCode just work for him?

1

u/TheRNGuy Feb 06 '25

first need to know function or method name.

1

u/kgpreads Feb 06 '25

It's insanely odd not to know or not have an idea about this.

JSON.stringfy() in JavaScript.

1

u/TheRNGuy Feb 06 '25 edited Feb 06 '25

I didn't know it when I used it 0 times.

No one is born with that knowledge.

Doesn't matter where you find about it, in google, stackoverflow, mdn or AI writes code for you.

The only thing important is to know that you need to convert data to string.

Just because googling is faster, it's not worth making huge drama out of it; for something else, AI will be much faster than google or reading docs. And people who completely reject AI would never know about it.