Developer Logs 7% Recall on First Vulnerability Scanner Run, Then Fixes It Methodically

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A developer building an AI-powered Java vulnerability scanner recorded a recall score of just 0.07 on its first run against the OWASP Benchmark, meaning it missed 93% of real bugs in 2,740 labeled test cases. Rather than hiding the result, the developer documented it as a deliberate 'spike' — a minimal first version designed only to confirm the core taint-tracking engine functioned correctly. Improvement came through systematic analysis: surveying which HTTP input methods the benchmark actually used and consolidating them into a single shared source definition. Two targeted fixes — adding Spring JdbcTemplate as a SQL injection sink and switching to receiver-text matching for XSS sinks — pushed recall from 0.07 to 0.83. The process demonstrated that transparent, incremental measurement outperformed broad rule additions as a debugging strategy.

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