error-handling-patterns

error-handling-patterns is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills. It costs 74 tokens per session (3,817 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A code-review guide for checking how programs report and recover from failures, such as service outages, invalid input, or missing data. It covers approaches including typed results, exceptions, retries, and fallback behavior.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review code that calls services, databases, files, or asynchronous operations, and to check retry limits, timeouts, circuit breakers, error context, and safe fallback behavior.
Why use it?
It helps find failures that are hidden, handled too broadly, or retried in unsafe ways before they reach users or cause wider outages.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to review code that calls services, databases, files, or asynchronous operations, and to check retry limits, timeouts, circuit breakers, error context, and safe fallback behavior.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/error-handling-patterns
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.

Any agent
npx skills add mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills --skill error-handling-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for error-handling-patterns

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/error-handling-patterns.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/error-handling-patterns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/error-handling-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills/error-handling-patterns.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,817 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00074 $0.03817
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.01909
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00763
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00382

Measured 8d ago against content hash 2d238fd45358, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

error-handling-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 8d 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.

skills/error-handling-patterns/SKILL.md · 428 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 428 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Error Handling Patterns for Code Review

Overview

Swallowed exceptions hide production failures, missing retries cause cascading outages, and overly broad catches mask the real problem. Use this guide during code review to catch error handling hazards before they ship.

When to use: Reviewing code that calls external services, databases, file systems, or async operations; evaluating retry/circuit-breaker logic; any code touching user input or third-party data.

Quick Reference

Pattern Core Idea Primary Red Flag
Result/Either Return success or error as a value Ignoring returned error values, missing .ok check
Exception Hierarchies Structured, typed exception tree Catching base Exception, throwing generic strings
Error Propagation Each layer adds context before forwarding Swallowing errors, leaking internal details to callers
Retry with Backoff Retry transient failures with increasing delays No backoff, no retry limit, retrying non-idempotent ops
Circuit Breaker Stop calling a failing service after threshold No timeout on HTTP calls, no circuit breaker on dependencies
Fail-Fast Validate inputs immediately at boundaries Deep processing before input validation, late null checks
Graceful Degradation Partial results or fallback when dependency fails Entire request fails because one optional service is down
Error Boundaries Contain errors to prevent cascade Unhandled promise rejections, no global error handler
Null Object / Optional Typed absence eliminates null checks Null returns from methods, unchecked Optional
Dead Letter Queue Route unprocessable messages for later analysis Silently dropping failed messages

Patterns in Detail

1. Result/Either Types

Red Flags:

  • Returned error values ignored: result, _ := doSomething() in Go
  • Result or Either returned but .ok / .isOk() never checked
  • Mixing exceptions and Result types in the same layer
  • Unwrapping without checking: .unwrap() (Rust) panics on Err

Read the full file on GitHub · 428 lines

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. 8d ago First seen · 428 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A 2d238fd45358

Subscribe to this mod's changes

error-handling-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository mickeyyaya/refactoring-skills (6 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 3,817 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.