The bug that grades in the wrong language
Severo's most dangerous defect gets named: with the whole backend written in English, a Spanish speaker learning English sometimes gets their words graded in Spanish, and because the agent carries its memory forward, one confusion poisons everything after it. The current fix is a delete-words button no user will ever find; the planned one is a dictionary check on every graded word. The stakes are majority-sized: English is what most users come for.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 43:49 (la memoria que perpetúa el error)
- ↳ video diary @ 48:20 (el costo: más de la mitad de los usuarios)
- ↳ Entry 207-1: The seed you can't eat (otra vez el LLM haciendo lo más probable)
The failure geometry is specific: Severo’s backend and instructions live entirely in English ▸ 43:22, so when a Spanish speaker studies English, the grading agent sometimes concludes the student is studying Spanish and starts scoring Spanish words ▸ 43:49. Worse, the agent remembers: once the wrong language enters its memory, every later grade inherits the confusion ▸ 44:07, the most-probable-path problem wearing its ugliest outfit.
His current mitigation is a developer’s fix, not a user’s: a button that deletes unwanted words from inside the app ▸ 44:20, plus re-telling the agent which language you meant. He grades it honestly: nobody should have to explain twice what they’re studying, nobody knows the delete button exists ▸ 45:01, and a new user whose database starts poisoned has no path back, “y van a parar de usarla” ▸ 45:21.
un error de idioma en el primer día es un usuario menos para siempre →
The planned fix is deterministic where the model is not: a dictionary-style check on every graded word, is this English or Spanish, catching the agent the moment it certifies the wrong tongue ▸ 45:38, needed only for English since no other target misfires ▸ 46:03. The sizing argument makes it the top priority: whatever the app’s 308 language pairs suggest, the mass of demand is English ▸ 47:21, and he’s barely tested that path himself because he already speaks it ▸ 47:07. Leave the bug and “se nos van más de la mitad de los usuarios” ▸ 48:20.
Housekeeping seals the week’s reorganization: Severo’s repository moved into the LuarAI org so the socio can start working it, per the investor’s role map ▸ 48:32. The founder hunting users, the partner inheriting code, and the first task in the handoff queue is the bug that eats the majority…
// continued in
no entry has continued this idea yet: the arc is still open