I built 21 tiny dev tools so I'd stop pasting the same prompts into ChatGPT

Tej Chalishazar — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 11:37:25 +0000

A few months ago I noticed a pattern: multiple times a week, I'd open
a chat window and type some version of "convert this JSON to YAML" or
"what does this cron expression mean" or "decode this JWT for me."

None of these are hard questions. They're just repetitive ones — and
for anything I'm about to actually run in production, I'd rather trust
a real, deterministic parser than an LLM's best guess anyway. A
mis-parsed cron job or a subtly wrong regex is the kind of thing that
should never depend on a model getting lucky.

So I built dedicated tools instead.

What it is

TinyDevUtils is a small, free collection
of browser-based utilities — 24 so far, spread across four categories:

Format & Convert — JSON/YAML/CSV conversion, Base64, URL encoding, color conversion, Markdown ⇄ HTML
Date & Time — a cron builder/explainer, Unix timestamp converter
Development — regex tester, JWT decoder, hash generator, UUID/ULID generator, barcode generation
Text & Data — diff checker, case converter, slug generator, fake data generation

Every tool runs entirely client-side. Whatever you paste in — a JSON
blob, a JWT, a cron string — never leaves your browser. No account, no
sign-up, no usage limits.

Why not just keep using ChatGPT for this?

Genuinely fair question, and I don't think LLMs are bad at these tasks
— they're actually pretty good at most of them. But a couple of things
pushed me toward building dedicated tools instead:

Speed. Opening a chat, typing a prompt, and waiting for a response is slower than pasting into a tool that converts instantly on keystroke — especially for something you do many times a day.
Determinism. A parser either works or throws an error. An LLM can subtly hallucinate a wrong cron field or mis-decode part of a token, and you might not notice until it breaks something.
Habit. Most devs still Google "json to yaml converter" before thinking to ask an AI — that muscle memory isn't going away overnight.

What's next

Still actively adding tools — a few more format converters and a
proper Git command visualizer are next on the list. If there's
something you find yourself repeatedly Googling or asking an AI to do,
I'd genuinely like to hear about it in the comments — happy to add it.

🔗 https://tinydevutils.com

DEV Community: Tej Chalishazar

I built 21 tiny dev tools so I'd stop pasting the same prompts into ChatGPT

What it is

Why not just keep using ChatGPT for this?

What's next