It was a real workload from my day job, a modest merge request, I asked for a review and for an implementation plan to fix the findings, nothing crazy. It's the most simple thing I could think of that wasn't an artificial benchmark, self contained, no need to look for extra documentation, web searches, etc.
Yeah something must be actively broken or just an awful extension for it to have that much effect.
Most things you can mess with the big effect is like, oh a thousand tokens ended up in the ~system prompt, or 10% extra or fewer work based on extra tool calls or churning through thinking or whatever.
Harness stuff if it's 8x worse that's like, it's fucked and broken, something went _wrong_.
