This page was translated from Dutch with AI.
Make your AI think in English, even if you work in Dutch
In the workshop I sometimes show the instructions for my own agent. People expect something complicated. What stands out to them most is one short sentence at the top: you do all the work in English. You think in English, you write your intermediate steps in English and you brief other agents in English.
Then comes the question I can see coming. Steff, you write everything in Dutch, right? That is correct. My articles, my emails, my workshops. But what my AI does along the way to get there, happens in English. And there is a very practical reason for that.
How an AI sees a word
An AI does not read words like you do. It cuts text into pieces, tokens. A token is a word or a part of a word. Short and frequently used English is often one piece per word. It cuts Dutch into pieces much more often.
Take the word handdoek. For an AI, that contains hand, and doek, and the whole thing. And that is still a short word. We Dutch speakers are champions at sticking words together: klantentevredenheidsonderzoek, personeelsadministratie, kwaliteitshandboek. Each of those words is cut into a string of pieces.
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