This is a little clickbaity. I was expecting that Thomas would point out something in oral arguments or in a ruling that make the author look back and say "oh crap, he's right, that doesn't make sense, and it's an artifact of this bug in the program".
To save you the click: the author's program needed to keep a table of Supreme Court Justice names to correctly parse the transcripts, and he forgot to put Thomas on the table. It didn't make a difference, since Thomas never spoke to begin with. Until one day, he did, and the output of the program was obviously wrong, leading to the bug's discovery.
So, it's the presence/absence of the name that found the bug (not the Justice himself!), and, if anything, Thomas delayed the discovery of the bug by breaking convention and never asking questions for so long.
To save you the click: the author's program needed to keep a table of Supreme Court Justice names to correctly parse the transcripts, and he forgot to put Thomas on the table. It didn't make a difference, since Thomas never spoke to begin with. Until one day, he did, and the output of the program was obviously wrong, leading to the bug's discovery.
So, it's the presence/absence of the name that found the bug (not the Justice himself!), and, if anything, Thomas delayed the discovery of the bug by breaking convention and never asking questions for so long.