Maybe this is less true in LLM land, but certainly it was right before
I disagree:
I was tasked with rewriting a Python application in ucode for use on OpenWRT. It's a low-resource and dynamic language, and sufficiently JavaScript-like that Opus 4.8 couldn't write code without errors that were obvious with my LSP. The interpreter errors were often reported with the the correct line and column numbers, but with the incorrect code and a vague error message. I had to ask it to use my LSP and fix the warnings and errors, which led to it fixing a few dozen bugs.
Just the other day, Fable 5.1 still wrote a lot of code in Rust that had compiler errors. While I'm sure it could have fixed these errors if the Rust compiler also reported incorrect line numbers, columns, code, with a vague error message to boot, I saved a substantial amount of time and tokens because its error reporting is so comprehensive.
Specific and accurate error message reporting will always have the same high value that it does today. Error messages are far cheaper to generate than tokens.
Comments
I disagree:
I was tasked with rewriting a Python application in ucode for use on OpenWRT. It's a low-resource and dynamic language, and sufficiently JavaScript-like that Opus 4.8 couldn't write code without errors that were obvious with my LSP. The interpreter errors were often reported with the the correct line and column numbers, but with the incorrect code and a vague error message. I had to ask it to use my LSP and fix the warnings and errors, which led to it fixing a few dozen bugs.
Just the other day, Fable 5.1 still wrote a lot of code in Rust that had compiler errors. While I'm sure it could have fixed these errors if the Rust compiler also reported incorrect line numbers, columns, code, with a vague error message to boot, I saved a substantial amount of time and tokens because its error reporting is so comprehensive.
Specific and accurate error message reporting will always have the same high value that it does today. Error messages are far cheaper to generate than tokens.