Error handling
Curated, auditable, benchmark-ready Agent Skills library for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, and more.
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What its author says it does
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Design robust error handling, retries, and failure modes for application code. Use whenever the user asks about exceptions, error types, retry policies, circuit breakers, timeouts, or how to handle failures in APIs, jobs, and distributed calls.
The file declares its own license as Apache-2.0. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.
SKILL.md
1.9 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Error Handling
Failures are normal. Design for classification, recovery, and operator visibility — not only try/catch cosmetics.
Workflow
- Enumerate failure modes (validation, not found, conflict, auth, dependency down, timeout, partial success).
- Separate expected domain errors from programmer bugs.
- Define user-visible messages vs internal detail (never leak secrets).
- Retries only for safe/idempotent operations with backoff and caps.
- Specify observability: structured logs, metrics, traces, correlation IDs.
- Document partial failure and compensation for multi-step workflows.
Output format
## Error design: <component>
### Taxonomy
| Kind | Example | Retry? | User message | Operator signal |
### Boundaries
Where errors are caught and translated.
### Retry / timeout policy
…
### Propagation
HTTP/RPC codes or typed errors callers see.
Rules
- Distinguish validation from infrastructure failures.
- Never retry non-idempotent writes without idempotency keys.
- Prefer explicit error types/codes over string matching.
- Map to stable public statuses; avoid silent 200-with-error unless pre-existing API law.
- Include cleanup for partial side effects.
- Fail closed on authorization uncertainty.
Edge cases
- Queues: poison messages, dead-letter, visibility timeouts.
- Fan-out: partial success reporting.
- Libraries: do not swallow exceptions to "keep going" without policy.