The author frames this as a contest between two architectures: either spend a lot of effort building custom developer tools, or repurpose the compiler as a server for multiple clients. Both approaches have their tradeoffs: the first, as the author mentions, violates DRY [1]. The second violates the Unix philosophy [2].
However, there is a third way. Both developer tools and compilers can be seen as special cases of a much simpler and more general pattern known as a graph database [3, 4, 5].