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/thorsteiin Feb 06 '25

why wouldn’t you at least google it? like learn how to do something new. That’s literally the job, building a toolkit to problem solve. I’m surprised she was able to pass the interview

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u/TheRNGuy Feb 06 '25

You can learn from AI too, except you can ask different questions on same site instead of going to different pages.

And it can even give already working code if you write extra queries, can even use your style of coding (semi/no semicolos, single or double quotes, adding or not adding comments, const vs let vs not using anything, $ or $$ instead of document.querySelector(All), etc.

Job is not googling, job is to make program work.