Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jnPiyush/AgentXnpx agentmods add skills/jnpiyush/agentx/error-handlingWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jnpiyush/agentx/error-handling)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jnpiyush/agentx/error-handling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jnpiyush/agentx/error-handling/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jnpiyush/agentx/error-handling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jnpiyush/agentx/error-handling.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00046 | $0.02033 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00813 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00407 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00203 |
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 1mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 280 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Error Handling
Purpose: Handle failures gracefully with logging, retries, and circuit breakers. Goal: No silent failures, clear error messages, system resilience. Note: For language-specific implementations, see C# Development or Python Development.
When to Use This Skill
- Designing error handling strategies
- Implementing retry policies with backoff
- Adding circuit breakers for external services
- Configuring request timeouts
- Building health check endpoints
Prerequisites
- Understanding of exception hierarchies in target language
- Resilience library available
Rationalization Table
Error handling is where shortcuts hide. Push back against these.
| Rationalization | Reality |
|---|---|
"I'll catch Exception / except: here, narrower types take too long." |
Bare catches swallow the bugs you most need to see, including programmer errors. Catch the specific exception types you can actually handle. |
| "This error can't happen in practice." | Then the right move is to fail loudly when it does, not to silently swallow it. Log + re-raise, do not return a default. |
| "I'll log and continue so the request still succeeds." | A partially-completed request that returns 200 is harder to debug than a clean 500. Decide explicitly whether to fail the request or to degrade. |
| "Retries will paper over the transient failure." | Retries without backoff or budget make outages worse. Always pair retries with exponential backoff, jitter, and a circuit breaker. |
| "Adding context to the error is noise." | The agent or operator reading the log has no other context. Include the operation, the identifiers, and the upstream cause. |
| "The framework already handles this." | Frameworks handle transport errors. They do not handle your domain invariants. Domain errors need explicit types and explicit handling. |
Decision Tree
Handling an error?
+- Expected failure (validation, not-found)?
| - Return error result/status code, don't throw
+- Unexpected failure (network, I/O, timeout)?
| +- Transient? -> Retry with exponential backoff
| | - Still failing after retries? -> Circuit breaker
| - Permanent? -> Log + return error response
+- What to catch?
| +- Specific exception -> catch specific, handle specifically
| +- Base exception -> only at top-level boundaries
| - NEVER catch and swallow silently
+- Error response format?
| +- API? -> RFC 7807 Problem Details
| - UI? -> User-friendly message + log technical details
- Logging?
- Always include: correlation ID, exception type, stack trace, context
What ships with it
2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 1mo ago Changed ea6a325b8c23
- 1mo ago First seen · 280 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A 1477d22f4d74
error-handling is a skill published in the GitHub repository jnPiyush/AgentX (16 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 2,033 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-03.
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