AI coding assistants when English isn't your first language

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!