Why High-Context Culture Makes AI Coding Harder — A Japanese Developer's Perspective

I'm a software engineer in Japan. I've been using AI coding assistants — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot — for about one years now. At some point I started keeping informal notes on how many prompt revisions it took to get production-quality output. After a few months, a pattern was hard to ignore. For tasks I described in Japanese: 4–6 revisions on average. Watching colleagues who worked primarily in English: 1–3. Same AI. Same model. Roughly similar task complexity. Different language — and appar