This is why I strongly prefer working on software made by developers for developers. That is to say, internal tooling. You can just show the entire error message in as much detail as possible, without a PM stepping in and saying you can't show this much scary text to the typical user. Especially if the user of the software also has easy access to your source code so they can search for the exact string and find the exact location of the error, and understand exactly what checks are being done to emit that error.

Good error messages are hard. You want to tell the user what to do, but if you knew that the error could be thrown, you probably should have been gracefully handling the problem. You don't know what information is useful to a hacker and you don't know how your error will be propagated. Meaningful errors at one level ("incorrect parameters passed" when calling an API) is perfectly useless at another level ("incorrect parameters passed" when interacting with a React UI). And if you respect all of the above, at some point you'll end up with an error message that basically says "I can't tell you what, why or how something went wrong, but it did."

There's two directions that goes into. Highly specialized error codes with zero results on search engines, or overly generic errors with a billion results and underlying reasons.

Error design needs to be its own subject / specialization. Errors need to say what the problem is and how to fix it, in an ideal world, or what the user can do or should google to solve it.

And of course, any error code of any public software should be listed on a website or a locally accessible resource.

It's not a new trend - error-code based software would propagate that ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER all the way from the function with the invalid parameter back out to the return value of the user operation, then helpfully tell the user "Invalid parameter!"

Exceptions with string messages and full stack traces might be yet another underrated Java invention.

Something went wrong frowning smiley. Our engineers are probably working hard on fixing it right now.

I grew up with "System Error Type 11" (or whatever the exact quote was, hard to find on google).

I think the only button on the dialog box was "Restart".