Menu

Individual skill

error-handling-patterns

Designs robust, production-grade error handling — choosing between result types and exceptions, implementing retries with exponential backoff and jitter, applying timeouts and deadlines, adding circuit breakers, and building graceful degradation and fallbacks. Use this skill when writing or reviewing code that calls networks/databases/external APIs, when asked to "make this resilient", "add retry logic", "handle failures", "add timeouts", "handle errors properly", "make this fault tolerant", "add a circuit breaker", "stop swallowing exceptions", or when classifying errors as transient vs permanent and deciding what to retry, fail fast, or degrade.

error-handling-patterns/SKILL.md

Read pinned source

Source commit f9a456bf34c297bd23fb234f410ec9b239ebed14

What was checked

Matches the observed repository HEAD
Yes
Scanner rules are current
Yes
Repository scan complete
No
Skill scan complete
Yes
Observed behavior
Network or broad shell
Last checked
Nov 6, 2026

These are observations at the recorded commit, not a guarantee of safety. Review the source before running it.

Install this skill

Choose an agent in your Stack or copy a command below. Commands fetch the pinned commit and copy only this skill directory. Existing destinations are refused. Copying a command does not install anything.

An install command is unavailable: current rules, complete repository and skill scans, an eligible behavior level and a permitted license are required.

Repository context

Repository stars (not skill ratings)
12
Repository last updated
Oct 14, 2026
License
MIT

Observed agent integration: No specific integration evidence. Standard SKILL.md installation does not imply verified compatibility.

Files and excerpt

File metadata and permitted, redacted excerpts come from the recorded scan. Source links are pinned to that commit.

Browse files
Read excerpt

# Error Handling Patterns

## Overview

Robust error handling is about making explicit, deliberate decisions for every failure mode instead of letting failures propagate as unhandled crashes, silent data corruption, or hung requests. This skill provides a decision framework and concrete patterns for: distinguishing recoverable from unrecoverable errors, choosing between result types and exceptions, retrying transient failures safely, bounding latency with timeouts and deadlines, protecting failing dependencies with circuit breakers, and degrading gracefully when a dependency is down.

Keywords: error handling, exceptions, result type, Either, retry, exponential backoff, jitter, timeout, deadline, circuit breaker, bulkhead, idempotency, graceful degradation, fallback, fail fast, fault tolerance, resilience, transient errors, dead letter queue.

Apply this skill whenever code crosses a trust or failure boundary: network calls, database queries, file I/O, external APIs, message queues, subprocess execution, or any operation that can fail in ways the caller must handle.

## Core Principles

1. **Every error has exactly one owner.** At each layer, decide: handle it here, transform and rethrow, or let it propagate. Never silently swallow.
2. **Classify before you react.** A failure is either *transient* (retry may succeed) or *permanent* (retry is futile). The classification drives every other decision. See `references/error-taxonomy.md`.