The author ( me :P ) mentions that using a.equals(b) is the correct solution right at the beginning of the post. Unfortunately this problem will continue to occur as long as autoboxing exists, so I think it's a valid idea to simply enforce a rule across your team that says 'Here's how we're going to avoid autoboxing problems'. I intended this post to be more of an illustration of what autoboxing does.

With regards to your comment that the solution is not to create separate integer instances - I was attempting to show that this is a possible solution to autoboxing headaches rather than 'the correct' solution for testing integer equality, because the objects are not cached. Sometimes you want to use == for valid reasons, the problem I had was because I wasn't vigilant enough in checking my own code and used == when I shouldn't have used it in the first place.

Perhaps this post could have been written more clearly - but as it happens, you're spot on. The examples at the end of the post were intended to be potential solutions to autoboxing headaches in general, rather than a solution for my specific problem :)