I had encountred a number of times for the need to give a structured message through gRPC errors The default Go err or status.Errorf functions are simple strings by default.

func (s *Server) LintFile(ctx context.Context, req *LintRequest) (*LintResponse, error) {
	lintRes, err := lint(ctx, req.GetFile())
	if err != nil {
		// lintRes is a protbuf message containing detailed error
		// for each line in the given file.
		return nil, status.New(codes.FailedPrecondition, "File isn't valid").WithDetails(lintRes)
	}
	return &LintResponse{}, nil
}

The example above illustrates a situation where you need to know what exactly was wrong with the file, The line number of where the error happened, what’s the reason etc.