Hi DEV 👋 This is my first post here.
I'm a software engineering researcher in the Social Software Engineering group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), and I also teach at Universidad de Guayaquil, Ecuador.
For a while my work has focused on developers who don't use English as their first language. Earlier, we looked at Stack Overflow in Portuguese and whether Brazilian developers found it useful. More recently, with Alexander Serebrenik and Mark van den Brand, I surveyed Spanish-speaking developers about how they use AI coding tools in bilingual work (AI Coding Tools in Bilingual Software Development: A Survey of Spanish-Speaking Developers, 2025).
Most of these tools are documented and tested mainly in English. That raises some practical questions:
- Do you write prompts in English or in your own language? Why?
- Do you notice a difference in answer quality depending on the language?
- What language do you use for code comments, commit messages and variable names, and does the assistant handle it well?
I'd like to hear from you in the comments, whatever language you code in. I'll share more about our results in future posts.
Thanks for reading!
Top comments (1)
Researcher or not, this matches my working day almost exactly. I draft my thinking in Japanese first, then write the actual prompt in English, mostly because the documentation I end up arguing with is in English. The cost is subtle: my English prompt is usually a simplified version of what I meant, so the first answer aims at a smaller problem than the one in my head. Code comments split the same way. Variable names stay English, commit messages are English, but comments that future me needs to understand quickly are Japanese, and the assistant handles those fine. The one place I notice a real quality gap is follow up questions. When I ask in Japanese, my requests come out vaguer, and I get vaguer answers back. In your survey, did people describe switching languages in the middle of one task, Spanish for the conversation and English for the code itself?