The Tech Nation, Newsletter #7 body { margin: 0; padding: 20px; background: #e5e5e5; font-family: 'Inter', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; } Issue #7 · May 2026 THE TECH NATION People. Tech. Impact. ⚡ Save the dates · Two ways to build with us this month 🧀 Cheese, Tech & Wine #3 · May 21 · Get ticket → ⚡ Crewly Cohort #2 + Lunch · May 19 · Get ticket → This week: why prompting in English is literally cheaper, why "Claude Code" is the worst name Anthropic could have picked, and the compute reset that is coming (with how to enjoy the discount while it lasts). Plus a quick look back at Claude #3 from last night. Main Feature Why prompting in English is literally cheaper. "Same prompt. Same answer. Different bill. Small move, real savings." LLMs do not read words, they read tokens. And tokenization is heavily biased toward English. The exact same prompt in Spanish or French eats 30 to 60% more tokens than in English. You pay per token. So yes, you pay more. The numbers we keep coming back to (source we kept from our previous deep-dive, still the cleanest read out there): English ~1.3 tokens / word French / Spanish ~2 tokens / word Mandarin / Arabic / Hindi 2 to 4× English Code blocks language-agnostic What we do at The Tech Nation: we prompt in English by default, even when the output needs to land in Spanish or French. We just ask for the answer in the target language at the end of the prompt. Same quality, lower bill, faster response. Quick heads-up, in case you needed to hear it If you are Spanish, French, or any other non-English native, and you are not hitting your usage limits today, do not change your habits. Keep typing in your language, that is what matters. This is good to know once you start scaling a real product where token costs add up. The most important thing is to try and build. The English trick can wait until you actually need it. 🧀 Want to try this hands-on? This is exactly the kind of thing we unpack at Cheese, Tech & Wine #3 (May 21) and inside Crewly Cohort #2 + Lunch (May 19, Norrsken House). Same topic, two formats, masterclass vibe vs. small-group prototype building. Hot Take "Claude Code" is the worst name Anthropic could have picked. Manar, our CTO, keeps saying they should just rename it Claude Agent. We agree with him. Half the non-tech founders we talk to skip Claude Code on the spot because they assume it is "for developers". It is not. It is the cleanest leap there is from "I use a chatbot" to "I have an AI agent that actually does things for me". For dummies, in one paragraph ChatGPT / Claude.ai A chatbot. You type, it answers. You copy paste. You are still the operator. Claude Code An agent. You give it a goal. It reads files, writes new ones, runs commands, fixes its own mistakes. It becomes the operator. You become the director. Things we do with it every day, zero of which is "coding": Sweep through 200 emails and draft replies in our voice Read a 60-page PDF and turn it into a one-page memo Build a slide deck from a meeting transcript Run a CRM cleanup pass overnight Maintain entire knowledge bases that update themselves Try it on something non-technical first. Take a task you do every Monday morning, hand it over, watch what happens. You will get it in 20 minutes. Until Anthropic listens to Manar, the name will keep scaring off exactly the people who need it most. Perspective The compute reset is coming. Here is how to enjoy the discount. Your $20 Claude subscription will probably not stay $20 forever. That is fine, you just need to know the game. Quiet truth almost nobody says out loud: the big AI labs are losing money on every token you generate. GPUs (the chips that actually run the models) cost more than what OpenAI, Anthropic and the rest are charging you today. Why the gift? Same playbook as every category before it. Spotify lost money for a decade. Uber lost money for a decade. Netflix lost money for a decade. Pattern is always the same: subsidize until users are hooked, then reprice. We are smack in the middle of the "get hooked" phase, and honestly, good for us. Use the discount while it lasts, get fluent, get faster, get to the point where the value you create with these tools is 100× what you pay. Then the reprice does not hurt, you are already shipping things that would have cost 10× without them. 🎉 Good news, on cue Our friends at Anthropic are gifting you $20 in tokens. Perfect timing to put this whole article into practice. Claim it, build something, and let the discount actually pay for the muscle you are building. Claim your $20 → Three small moves that pay off when prices move 01 Lock in annual plans where you can. They tend to grandfather pricing the longest. 02 Build with portability. Abstraction layers (the AI SDK pattern) let you swap providers without rewriting your stack. 03 Measure tokens, not vibes. Know your bill per feature. The next pricing wave becomes a non-event. The era of dirt-cheap intelligence is a moment, not a state. Enjoy it, learn fast, build the muscle. That is the whole trick. Looking back Claude Community Meetup #3. Claude Code for Builders. Four builders on stage. A few takeaways, a couple of giveaways. We wrapped Claude #3 last night at WTC Barcelona. Four people came to share what they actually shipped with Claude Code. 🎤 The four speakers Sara Noureldin, CTO of Anda"Decoding how an African city moves with Claude Code" Sergey Cherepanov, CTO of Guass"Razzmatazzing and Recombobulating, a harness for testing" Heather Thacker, Developer Advocate at Gatling"Developer Content Flywheel, using Claude to turn code into career capital" Al Ste-Marie, Founder, The Unsold Group"Hatching Flipper 🐧 with Claude Managed Agents" We also gave away one AI Summit Barcelona ticket to a lucky attendee, and handed out Claude credits so people could go home and actually try the things they had just heard about. ⚡ What's next Claude #4 is already in the works. Date and Luma link dropping in the next newsletter. Stay tuned, the room fills fast. Big thanks to Anthropic, Olivier Legris, AI Summit Barcelona and WTC Barcelona Events for making it happen. Plug in Building in Barcelona? Here's how to plug in. Four altitudes. Pick the one that matches where you are right now. Level 01 · Claude Community Events · Feel the hype. The networking room. Big energy. Official Anthropic format. You meet the people who are actually building. Best entry point if you want to feel what is going on in this city right now. Follow for #4 announcement → Level 02 · Cheese, Tech & Wine · Discover concretely how to build. Masterclass format. Smaller room. Hands-on. Around 80 people, one focused theme, real practice. You leave with concrete inputs (and a glass of wine). Join the next Masterclass (May 21) → Level 03 · Crewly Cohort · Begin building. Group of 8. Two hours. Bring an idea, leave with a prototype. Next session: May 19, Norrsken House Barcelona. Two hours, lunch and drink on us, €180. Cohort #1 is fully booked, so #2 is the one to grab. Get ticket Cohort #2 + Lunch → Level 04 · Crewly · The Tech Nation · Scale. A real tech team. At your service. Day one. You are past curious, you want to ship for real. Product, tech, AI, delivery, integrated. Plug into it instead of building it. Book a demo → Agenda · May / Sep 🧀 May 21 · Masterclass Cheese, Tech & Wine #3 · Build my Personal Assistant agent. ~80 people, one focused theme, hands-on. Cheese and wine for the networking part. Get ticket → ⚡ May 19 · Cohort + Lunch · Norrsken House Crewly Cohort #2 + Lunch. 2h hands-on, 8 people. Bring your idea, leave with a prototype that holds. €180, lunch and drink on us. Cohort #1 is fully booked, so #2 is the one to grab. Get ticket → Sep 22 to 23 · Barcelona AI Summit Barcelona · Very Early Birds. Lovable, AWS, and Anthropic confirmed. 200+ speakers. 10,000+ attendees. Prices going up soon. JEMW20 20% off, stackable aisummitbarcelona.com → ⚡ Coming soon Claude Community Meetup #4 Date and Luma link in the next newsletter. If this newsletter is useful, share it. If you're building something, let's talk. ☀️ Lifestyle · Sunset Paella Club Sunset Paella Club. A Mediterranean Saturday in Barcelona. Paella, music, golden hour. Saturday May 30. Paella at 14:30, music until midnight. Zero work talk, just a great BCN afternoon turning into a great BCN night. If you are around and want to come hang, the door is open. Get your ticket → P.S. · small wink 🎂 This edition also happens to be Jérémie's 40th candle. Cake will be discreet, paella will not. You're building something. You want to move faster. Let's talk about how we can help. LET'S TALK LinkedIn Instagram People. Tech. Impact.