error-recovery-patterns

Coding rules for defining clear error types with details such as a code, retry status, module, method, and cause.

In plain words
What is it for?
Creating database-related errors and documenting the operation and component where an error occurred.
Why use it?
They encourage errors to carry enough context to understand what failed and decide whether trying again may help.

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/pauljphilp/effectiveagent/error-recovery-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PaulJPhilp/EffectiveAgent

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 2,352 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 2,352 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin unknown 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 $0.02352 $0.02352
Opus 5 $0.01176 $0.01176
Sonnet 5 $0.00470 $0.00470
Haiku 4.5 $0.00235 $0.00235

Measured 2d ago against content hash 97385f75b0c0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

error-recovery-patterns 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/error-recovery-patterns.mdc · 415 lines

The source is not reproduced here

No licence file

A repository with no LICENSE is all rights reserved by default, so the body is not copied here. The metadata, the measurements and the link are.

Read it on GitHub

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 · 415 lines · 2,352 tokens per session scan A 97385f75b0c0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

error-recovery-patterns is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository PaulJPhilp/EffectiveAgent (11 stars, last pushed 9mo ago), with no licence file. It adds 2,352 tokens to every session, about $0.0118 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.