error-handling

Error-handling rules that favor preventing invalid states, passing failures through visibly, and adding context only when needed. Catching an error is reserved for deliberate recovery, retrying, compensation, or containment.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when designing validation, deciding whether to catch an exception, or handling failures in application code.
Why use it?
They prevent failures from disappearing silently and make problems easier to detect, test, and diagnose.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Install

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/nerds-odd-e/doughnut/error-handling
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nerds-odd-e/doughnut

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 210 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 210 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00210 $0.00210
Opus 5 $0.00105 $0.00105
Sonnet 5 $0.00042 $0.00042
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00021

Measured 2d ago against content hash e4bb2bc118b6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

error-handling 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 2d ago.

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.

.cursor/rules/error-handling.mdc · 30 lines

What it actually says

Prefer, in order:

  1. Prevent — make invalid states unrepresentable so the failure cannot arise.
  2. Propagate — leave the raw failure untouched so it fails visibly in tests or production.
  3. Enrich — add context only when the raw failure is unclear or may go unnoticed; preserve the original cause.
  4. Catch — only to deliberately recover, retry, compensate, or contain an explicitly best-effort operation.
Changes

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.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 30 lines · 210 tokens per session scan A e4bb2bc118b6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

error-handling is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository nerds-odd-e/doughnut (49 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 210 tokens to every session, about $0.0011 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.