That first error isn’t an Xcode issue. It’s a Swift compiler issue. And you can’t blame your IDE for your bad instincts—at some point those ritualistic fixes stopped being necessary and I haven’t had to do them for more than half a decade. You really should be digging into your code using breakpoints and logging to find the root cause.

I do think Xcode has very rough edges but if we’re criticizing it, we have to criticize the right points.

Wouldn’t a breakpoint or log message require the code to compile and run in order to work?

Dunno. Not sure you can so easily slice off Swift as "outside of XCode", since it isn't used by anything else and is basically required for any Apple development, and only Apple development.