The prompt has an accent

Beckman’s plant-vocabulary session runs smoothly enough to surface the subtler bugs. The big one is inherited from Sanfanson: grading a Portuguese speaker learning Italian, it would reject answers a native knows are fine. Diagnosis: the entire instruction is written in English, so the teacher “tiene un sesgo hacia el inglés” ▸ 7:06. Julia supplies the linguistics: Portuguese allows word orders English doesn’t, “se puede hacer en una orden, tanto en otra orden; inglés no” ▸ 7:12, so an English-thinking grader marks flexibility as error. The clever fix he’s weighing: generate the system prompt itself in the user’s native language ▸ 6:46, give the teacher the student’s accent instead of the developer’s.

The rest of the session tunes personality. Current Beckman is relentlessly positive, “todo friendly, todo bien”, and they sketch the alternative: a deliberately fastidioso teacher ▸ 8:25, offered as an option with positive as the default. Julia reaches for a game she loved, the old bartender game whose barman pulled faces as you mixed drinks ▸ 10:30, and the tamagotchi thread returns: a face on every answer ▸ 11:44, “un profesor también tiene caras y bocas”.

el idioma del system prompt es un sesgo del producto →

Also logged, honestly: of the eight exercise types in the prompt, Beckman only ever uses four; the word-scramble exercise never actually scrambles. Prompts drift toward their comfortable subset the way teachers drift toward their favorite drills, which is why the fastidioso option matters: variety, in exercises and in temperament, is something you have to enforce, not request…