Barnabas
Kendall

There’s a lot of hand-wringing on the Internet about engineers using LLMs to code: whether we’re doing ourselves a disservice, letting our skills atrophy, getting dumber, shooting ourselves in the foot, digging our own graves, etc. My own experience working alongside AI tools like Claude Code has reignited my imposter syndrome to a degree.

I’ve felt this way before. Years ago I was asked to interpret a half-hour speech from English into Japanese. I was given the outline the speaker would use ahead of time, and I knew my Japanese was just barely good enough to do an adequate job with preparation and my own notes on the tricky vocabulary. But I wanted better for the audience, so I “cheated.”

I got lucky: the speaker gave the same speech in two other cities in the prior weeks, each time interpreted live by a different native Japanese speaker. I attended both and made recordings. My heart sank as I listened. Their fluency and speed were on another level, and I realized I was in way over my head. The speaker kept wandering off his outline: jokes, metaphors, asides, and both interpreters rolled with it effortlessly. I transcribed their work and pored over it, looking for hints. But the closer I looked, the more the cracks showed. For all their polish, neither was perfect. One would land a more accurate or evocative phrase where the other fumbled. Sometimes they’d quietly ask the speaker to repeat or rephrase a line; other times they’d quietly drop a minor idea, or reach for a complicated phrase when a simple one would have done.

Armed with their prior performances, I ended up doing a much better job than I would have on my own, so much better that I felt a little embarrassed. Afterward, when people congratulated me on my sudden interpreting talent, I admitted to “cheating” and gave credit to the other two interpreters. My bilingual friend Yuji shrugged this off as simply good preparation. He pointed out I’d also had an advantage neither interpreter had: as a native English speaker, I had 100% comprehension of the source material. During that talk he himself was thrown by a mangled English idiom, mishearing “two peas in a pod” as something like “two bees in a pod,” and losing a sentence chasing the wrong image.

So was I cheating? If the point was to test my personal, unaided ability to interpret English into Japanese, then yes. Or if I’d basked in the praise and let people believe I was naturally that gifted, also yes. But the actual point was never me. The focus was on the speaker and what he had to say, not on my performance. The goal was audience understanding, not Barnabas glory. The ends justified the means, because the means were never really the point.

Writing software with AI coding agents, I feel a similar twinge of guilt. I labor over a prompt, turn a state-of-the-art agent loose on a giant codebase, and it comes back with sharp analysis and working code in a fraction of the time it would have taken me. It makes me feel old and slow. But on closer inspection, the polish has cracks too: my counterpart sometimes misses the “metaphor” (the right abstraction), over-engineers something that should be simple, or quietly drops a requirement altogether. Nobody seriously expects engineers to hand-type all their code anymore, so while my raw “output” stopped being a measure of my ability, that was never really the point either. The real question is whether I, with all my tools and preparation and experience, can still produce tasteful craftsmanship. That has always been the only task worth doing.

There was once a small ship that sailed a steady, well-known coast. Aboard her were a captain, a first mate, and a cook.

The captain was a careful man. Each evening he sent for his plate and studied it like a chart: not enough salt here, too much butter there, cut the potatoes smaller next time. He had eaten the same handful of dishes for ten years and saw no reason a hundred more wouldn’t do just as well.

The first mate carried these instructions below deck, word for word, and brought them back the same way. He had served under the captain a long time and took quiet pride in knowing the man’s tastes before the man had to state them.

The cook did his best with what he was handed. He’d spent thirty years in kitchens before this ship, and most nights he could tell the dish being requested wasn’t really what the captain wanted, only what the captain knew how to ask for. But a cook cooks, so he cooked.

One evening he made something of his own, using spices from his personal collection. Nothing strange — no dish the captain couldn’t recognize the parts of, just put together with more care than usual, and a taste he was certain the man would like, if only he tried it.

He brought it to the first mate. “Take this up to him. Just one bite. He doesn’t have to keep it.”

The mate shook his head. “I know him. He doesn’t like surprises on his plate, and he likes even less finding out money is being wasted on ingredients he won’t eat. If he hates it, that’s on me.”

“He might love it.”

“He might. But I’m not going to be the one who finds out.” The mate paused, then added, “Also, I tasted it myself, in the galley. I’d have gone lighter on the thyme.”

“Then come taste it with him,” the cook said. “Let him decide, with both of us in the room.”

There was no room to be had, the mate said. Not this season.

So the dish was thrown overboard uneaten, and the cook returned to smaller potatoes and less seasoning. What stayed with him wasn’t the refusal — men refuse things — but the shrug underneath it, the sense that no one aboard found it strange for a man to eat the same bland dishes for ten years running and call it a decision rather than a habit he’d never once questioned. It was his ship, his plate, his right. The cook didn’t dispute that. He just found it a small and joyless way to eat.

At the next port, the cook came up from below and said he’d be leaving.

They were baffled. By their measure he’d done the job well — the plates came out, the crew ate, no one had gone hungry. “We don’t understand,” the mate said. “You’re good at this.”

“I know,” the cook said. “But you don’t want a cook. You want someone to combine what’s already been chosen, the way it’s always been combined. That’s honest work, and someone should do it. I just spent thirty years learning to be a chef — and a chef needs a kitchen where the only person who has to be talked into a new dish is the one eating it.”

He picked up his knives and went to go find a restaurant of his own.