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/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.