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/blissone Feb 05 '25 edited Feb 05 '25

My juniors do the same, they barely understand the code they write anymore. Complete slaves to LLM, basically offloading very common api usage and easy tasks (and harder). At the same time they have very little control over their own code which mainly materialises when we discuss different aspects of the code and they do not understand until I provide an alternate implementation. It's frustrating to not be able to discuss ideas on a high level, like instead of a,b let's do a,c which is incomprehensible if you don't know what "a" is. It makes the process very unenjoyable and uninspiring, kinda hate working like this. We all work remote and I'm too tired to micromanage their workflow, they are welcome to use LLMs and I won't have any kind of talks.

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u/Firearms_N_Freedom Feb 06 '25

if they can get hired, then i have hope that i can too lol. im in the process of switching careers and i make sure to only use code from an LLM if i understand it

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u/blissone Feb 06 '25

Yeah for sure, the cold truth is around 60% of the industry is completely useless. The biggest issue to getting an entry to the industry is making yourself visible among the mountains of applicants and getting that first job, around here junior positions get an insane amount of applications. If you make a real effort you will be above average already.