Issue 14, Oct 3, 2026
The Language Prior Trap
Senior AI Engineer interview at GitHub, and the interviewer asks:
“A user asks your coding agent to port a heavy data pipeline from Python to Rust. It nails the port. Then on every follow-up task, it goes back to writing and running Python. Is this a prompting bug?”
Don’t say: “Just make the prompt clearer. Tell it to use Rust.”
Why your coding agent quietly relapses into Python after one turn, and how pretraining and RL bias force you to fix the environment, not just the prompt.
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The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.