6 ms·

We're talking about Claude Code. If you're coding and not writing or thinking in English, the agents and people reading that code will have bigger problems than

We're talking about Claude Code. If you're coding and not writing or thinking in English, the agents and people reading that code will have bigger problems than a regexp missing a swear word :).

MetalSnake 7mo ago
I talk to it in non-English. But have rules to have everything in code and documentation in english. Only speaking with me should use my native language. Why would that be a problem?
- ekropotin 7mo ago
  Because 90% of training data was in English and therefore the model perform best in this language.
  - foldr 7mo ago
    In my experience these models work fine using another language, if it’s a widely spoken one. For example, sometimes I prompt in Spanish, just to practice. It doesn’t seem to affect the quality of code generation.
    - adamsb6 7mo ago
      They literally just have to subtract the vector for the source language and add the vector for the target. It’s the original use case for LLMs.
      - curioussquirrel 7mo ago
        Thank you. +1. There are obviously differences and things getting lost or slightly misaligned in the latent space, and these do cause degradation in reasoning quality, but the decline is very small in high resource languages.
    - ekropotin 7mo ago
      It’s just a subjective observation. It just can’t be a case simply because how ML works. In short, the more diverse and high quality texts with reasoning reach examples were in the training set, the better model performs on a given language. So unless Spanish subset had much more quality-dense examples, to make up for volume, there is no way the quality of reasoning in Spanish is on par with English. I apologise for the rambling explanation, I sure someone with ML expertise here can it explain it better.
      - foldr 7mo ago
        The agent may be translating to English behind the scenes. There are all kinds of hacks layered on top of the underlying models. But however exactly it works, it’s clearly not the case that these things only make use of Spanish training data when you prompt them in Spanish. Lets take a language with orders of magnitude less training data, like Nahuatl. The following is what happens if I ask Claude Code in Nahuatl to give me an example of a simple program that I can execute inside a web browser (avoiding any direct keyword prompts like 'Javascript' or 'Hello World'). Interestingly, it responds in Spanish. I doubt that it has any relevant training data in Nahuatl. (Apologies if the Nahuatl is wrong – I just used Google translate.) ¿Uelis techmakas se neskayotl tlen se programa tlen amo ouij tlen ueliskia nijchiuas ipan se navegador web? ----- Entiendo tu pregunta en náhuatl. Aquí un ejemplo sencillo — una calculadora en HTML puro que puedes abrir directo en el navegador, sin servidor: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Calculadora</title> <style> body { font-family: sans-serif; display: flex; justify-content: center; padding: 40px; } .calc { border: 1px solid #ccc; padding: 20px; border-radius: 8px; width: 200px; } input { width: 100%; margin-bottom: 10px; font-size: 1.2em; text-align: right; } button { width: 22%; margin: 2px; padding: 8px; font-size: 1em; cursor: pointer; } .wide { width: 47%; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="calc"> <input type="text" id="pantalla" readonly> <div> <button onclick="tecla('7')">7</button> <button onclick="tecla('8')">8</button> <button onclick="tecla('9')">9</button> <button onclick="tecla('/')">÷</button> <button onclick="tecla('4')">4</button> <button onclick="tecla('5')">5</button> <button onclick="tecla('6')">6</button> <button onclick="tecla('*')">×</button> <button onclick="tecla('1')">1</button> <button onclick="tecla('2')">2</button> <button onclick="tecla('3')">3</button> <button onclick="tecla('-')">−</button> <button onclick="tecla('0')">0</button> <button onclick="tecla('.')">.</button> <button onclick="tecla('+')">+</button> <button onclick="limpiar()">C</button> <button class="wide" onclick="calcular()">=</button> <button class="wide" onclick="borrar()">⌫</button> </div> </div> <script> const pantalla = document.getElementById('pantalla'); function tecla(val) { pantalla.value += val; } function calcular() { try { pantalla.value = eval(pantalla.value); } catch { pantalla.value = 'Error'; } } function limpiar() { pantalla.value = ''; } function borrar() { pantalla.value = pantalla.value.slice(0, -1); } </script> </body> </html> Guarda esto como calculadora.html y ábrelo en cualquier navegador — no necesita servidor ni dependencias. Es un buen punto de partida para aprender HTML, CSS y JavaScript.
formerly_proven 7mo ago
In my experience agents tend to (counterintuitively) perform better when the business language is not English / does not match the code's language. I'm assuming the increased attention mitigates the higher "cognitive" load.
cryptonector 7mo ago
Claude handles human languages other than English just fine.

We're talking about Claude Code. If you're coding and not writing or thinking in English, the agents and people reading that code will have bigger problems than a regexp missing a swear word :).

MetalSnake 7mo ago

I talk to it in non-English. But have rules to have everything in code and documentation in english. Only speaking with me should use my native language. Why would that be a problem?

ekropotin 7mo ago
Because 90% of training data was in English and therefore the model perform best in this language.
- foldr 7mo ago
  In my experience these models work fine using another language, if it’s a widely spoken one. For example, sometimes I prompt in Spanish, just to practice. It doesn’t seem to affect the quality of code generation.
  - adamsb6 7mo ago
    They literally just have to subtract the vector for the source language and add the vector for the target. It’s the original use case for LLMs.
    - curioussquirrel 7mo ago
      Thank you. +1. There are obviously differences and things getting lost or slightly misaligned in the latent space, and these do cause degradation in reasoning quality, but the decline is very small in high resource languages.
  - ekropotin 7mo ago
    It’s just a subjective observation. It just can’t be a case simply because how ML works. In short, the more diverse and high quality texts with reasoning reach examples were in the training set, the better model performs on a given language. So unless Spanish subset had much more quality-dense examples, to make up for volume, there is no way the quality of reasoning in Spanish is on par with English. I apologise for the rambling explanation, I sure someone with ML expertise here can it explain it better.
    - foldr 7mo ago
      The agent may be translating to English behind the scenes. There are all kinds of hacks layered on top of the underlying models. But however exactly it works, it’s clearly not the case that these things only make use of Spanish training data when you prompt them in Spanish. Lets take a language with orders of magnitude less training data, like Nahuatl. The following is what happens if I ask Claude Code in Nahuatl to give me an example of a simple program that I can execute inside a web browser (avoiding any direct keyword prompts like 'Javascript' or 'Hello World'). Interestingly, it responds in Spanish. I doubt that it has any relevant training data in Nahuatl. (Apologies if the Nahuatl is wrong – I just used Google translate.) ¿Uelis techmakas se neskayotl tlen se programa tlen amo ouij tlen ueliskia nijchiuas ipan se navegador web? ----- Entiendo tu pregunta en náhuatl. Aquí un ejemplo sencillo — una calculadora en HTML puro que puedes abrir directo en el navegador, sin servidor: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Calculadora</title> <style> body { font-family: sans-serif; display: flex; justify-content: center; padding: 40px; } .calc { border: 1px solid #ccc; padding: 20px; border-radius: 8px; width: 200px; } input { width: 100%; margin-bottom: 10px; font-size: 1.2em; text-align: right; } button { width: 22%; margin: 2px; padding: 8px; font-size: 1em; cursor: pointer; } .wide { width: 47%; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="calc"> <input type="text" id="pantalla" readonly> <div> <button onclick="tecla('7')">7</button> <button onclick="tecla('8')">8</button> <button onclick="tecla('9')">9</button> <button onclick="tecla('/')">÷</button> <button onclick="tecla('4')">4</button> <button onclick="tecla('5')">5</button> <button onclick="tecla('6')">6</button> <button onclick="tecla('*')">×</button> <button onclick="tecla('1')">1</button> <button onclick="tecla('2')">2</button> <button onclick="tecla('3')">3</button> <button onclick="tecla('-')">−</button> <button onclick="tecla('0')">0</button> <button onclick="tecla('.')">.</button> <button onclick="tecla('+')">+</button> <button onclick="limpiar()">C</button> <button class="wide" onclick="calcular()">=</button> <button class="wide" onclick="borrar()">⌫</button> </div> </div> <script> const pantalla = document.getElementById('pantalla'); function tecla(val) { pantalla.value += val; } function calcular() { try { pantalla.value = eval(pantalla.value); } catch { pantalla.value = 'Error'; } } function limpiar() { pantalla.value = ''; } function borrar() { pantalla.value = pantalla.value.slice(0, -1); } </script> </body> </html> Guarda esto como calculadora.html y ábrelo en cualquier navegador — no necesita servidor ni dependencias. Es un buen punto de partida para aprender HTML, CSS y JavaScript.

formerly_proven 7mo ago

In my experience agents tend to (counterintuitively) perform better when the business language is not English / does not match the code's language. I'm assuming the increased attention mitigates the higher "cognitive" load.

cryptonector 7mo ago

Claude handles human languages other than English just fine.