Should this really be considered an error?

$ pulumi stack output --stack ComputeSoftware/datomic-prod
error: current stack has no output properties

If the command issued no output, would that be more surprising? Or would you expect some output just not with red text and an error prefix?

I just wouldn't expect the process to exit with a non-zero status.

Okay, but if there was just text that said “current stack has no output properties” (and exited with code 0) that would seem reasonable to you?

Yes

Thanks, I’ll open an issue.

If

--json

is passed, however, it should return the empty map.