Real LLMs (observed with anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5 on a 23-agent run)
sometimes return Likert values as JSON strings ('3' not 3). The 4 subagent
validators rejected this with isinstance(v, int), losing ~30% of agents at
N=23. Added a shared coerce_int helper in base.py that accepts ints and
numeric strings, rejects bools/floats/garbage, and is now used by:
- Longitudinal: response values 1-5
- Diversity: Q-sort placements -3..+3 and 6 Likert axes 1-7
- Delphi: R2 and R3 importance/plausibility 1-5
- Scenario: 4 dimensions 1-7
Validators now coerce in place so downstream code sees ints regardless of
the wire format. Added 8 tests (4 unit on coerce_int + 4 per-subagent
contract tests showing stringified values are accepted).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Christian Moellmann