Chinese Language Is Not More Efficient Than English in Vibe Coding: A Preliminary Study on Token Cost and Problem-Solving Rate

ArXi:2604.14210v1 Announce Type: new A claim has been circulating on social media and practitioner forums that Chinese prompts are token-efficient than English for LLM coding tasks, potentially reducing costs by up to 40\%. This claim has influenced developers to consider switching to Chinese for ``vibe coding'' to save on API costs. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous empirical study using SWE-bench Lite, a benchmark of software engineering tasks, to evaluate whether this claim of Chinese token efficiency holds up to scrutiny.