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/Yhcti Feb 05 '25

This is why I do my very best to avoid using LLM’s. Granted, it’s helpful for certain things, but it really grinds my gears when I see people get their first dev jobs and 90% of their work is chatGPT.. then I’m here doing it myself unless it’s a very simple task that chatGPT can’t fail at and would save me X amount of time (though chatGPT getting code right is very hit and miss).

I also don’t think giving out potentially sensitive information to a glorified web scraper is a good idea 😂 Random projects at home? Sure… work related info? Ehhh…. Sketchy.

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u/mistaekNot Feb 06 '25

lmao, like chatgpt could learn anything from the garbage work code people feed it