Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add agents/continuedev/continue/error-message-qualitygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/continuedev/continueWhat it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00012 | $0.00384 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00006 | $0.00192 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00002 | $0.00077 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00001 | $0.00038 |
Grade A, and why
Error Message Quality scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
What it actually says
Error Message Quality Check
Review this pull request for error handling quality. The most common user-facing issues in this codebase are generic "Unknown error" messages and swallowed error details that prevent users from diagnosing problems themselves.
What to Check
-
Catch blocks that discard error details - Look for
catchblocks that re-throw or return a generic message without including the original error's message, status code, or context. -
HTTP status codes without user-friendly mapping - When making API calls (especially to LLM providers), ensure that common HTTP errors produce distinct, actionable messages:
401→ "Invalid API key" (not "Unknown error")402→ "Insufficient funds or quota exceeded"403→ "Access denied - check your API key permissions"429→ "Rate limited - please wait and retry"5xx→ "Provider service error - try again later"
-
Silent failures - Look for empty catch blocks, caught errors that are only logged but not surfaced, or promise rejections that are swallowed.
-
Error messages that lack context - Error messages should include what operation failed and what the user can do about it, not just the raw error string.
What NOT to Flag
- Internal error handling between modules where errors are properly propagated up
- Test files
- Debug/development-only error logging
- Errors that are intentionally caught and handled silently (with a clear code comment explaining why)
Scope
Only review files changed in this PR. Do not audit the entire codebase. If you find issues, make targeted fixes to improve the error messages in the changed code. If no error handling issues exist in the changed files, do nothing.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- yesterday First seen · 36 lines · 12 tokens per session scan A cb2cb2eeecd9
Error Message Quality is an agent published in the GitHub repository continuedev/continue (35,702 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 12 tokens to every session and 384 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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