Developer uncovers nine cascading bugs that silently truncated a multi-language benchmark

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A software developer investigating why a multi-language benchmarking tool stopped at N=22 instead of N=24 uncovered a chain of nine interconnected bugs across the codebase. The root cause was CPython 3.11's 4,300-digit cap on integer-to-string conversion, which crashed the Python agent on the 6,002-digit 24th Mersenne prime and had been silently worked around by shortening the test run. Further investigation revealed the benchmark's primary data-parsing path relied on predicting exact LLM phrasing, while direct HTTP agents falsely reported computing more Mersenne primes than their fixed lookup tables contained. The chart's title was also misleading, labelling a ~400x latency gap between LLM-routed and direct agents as a language performance comparison. Fixing each bug exposed the next, including one case where a performance improvement made results too fast for the parser's unit handling, requiring yet another patch.

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