This is my entry for DEV's Summer Bug Smash — Smash Stories.
Not every good bug is an epic. Some of them are one character long, and the interesting part is entirely in the hunt.
I was consuming the JSON output of a developer CLI — machine-readable mode, the structured projection you're supposed to build tooling against. My code was doing something completely ordinary: taking a file path out of that JSON and comparing it against a path I already had.
The comparison kept failing on paths that were obviously, visibly identical.
They weren't identical. The JSON contained:
