errors-and-status-codes

errors-and-status-codes is a skill for Claude Code from oborchers/fractional-cto. It costs 80 tokens per session (3,292 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to reporting API failures with suitable HTTP status codes and consistent error responses. It includes Problem Details, a standard format for explaining what went wrong and how to address it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing validation errors, error envelopes, per-field messages, status-code rules, or RFC 9457 Problem Details responses.
Why use it?
Clear status codes and error fields help client programs handle failures correctly and give developers information they can use to fix requests.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the api-design-principles plugin — 13 skills, 1 command, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it when designing validation errors, error envelopes, per-field messages, status-code rules, or RFC 9457 Problem Details responses.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/errors-and-status-codes
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 oborchers/fractional-cto --skill errors-and-status-codes
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oborchers/fractional-cto

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install api-design-principles, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 1 command, 1 agent.

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 errors-and-status-codes

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/errors-and-status-codes.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/errors-and-status-codes)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/errors-and-status-codes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/errors-and-status-codes.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,292 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 7 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 76
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 95
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 222
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 228
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 248
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 257
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 275
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00080 $0.03292
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.01646
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00658
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00329

Measured 8d ago against content hash 08ee6c6698e1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

errors-and-status-codes 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.

api-design-principles/skills/errors-and-status-codes/SKILL.md · 306 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 306 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Errors Are Part of Your API's Interface

A well-designed error response teaches the developer what went wrong, points them to the fix, and gives their code enough information to handle it automatically. Bad errors generate support tickets. Good errors eliminate them.

The HTTP status code is the first thing a client reads. It must be accurate, specific, and machine-actionable. The status code conveys the category of outcome; the response body conveys the detail. Never return 200 with { "success": false } -- it breaks HTTP semantics, defeats monitoring, and confuses every layer of infrastructure between your server and the client.

Status Code Decision Table

Pick the most specific code that applies. When in doubt, move down the table.

2xx -- Success

Code When to Use
200 OK GET, PUT, PATCH, and POST actions that are not resource creation. Return the resource.
201 Created A new resource was created. Return the resource and a Location header with its URI.
202 Accepted Async work was queued but not yet complete. Return a status object with a job URL.
204 No Content Success with intentionally no body. Use for DELETE. Also valid for PUT/PATCH when you omit the updated resource.

3xx -- Redirects

Code When to Use
301 Moved Permanently Resource has a new canonical URI. Clients should update bookmarks.
304 Not Modified Resource unchanged since If-None-Match or If-Modified-Since. Critical for caching.
307 Temporary Redirect Temporary reroute, method and body preserved.

4xx -- Client Errors

Code When to Use
400 Bad Request Malformed request. Unparseable JSON, missing required top-level fields, wrong content type. The problem is syntactic.
401 Unauthorized Authentication failed or missing. "Who are you?"
403 Forbidden Authenticated but not authorized. "I know who you are, and you cannot do this."
404 Not Found Resource does not exist. Also use 404 instead of 403 to hide resource existence from unauthorized callers.
405 Method Not Allowed HTTP method not supported. Include an Allow header listing valid methods.
409 Conflict State conflict -- duplicate resource, concurrent modification, invalid state transition.
422 Unprocessable Content Syntactically valid but semantically invalid. Business rule violations, field-level validation failures.
429 Too Many Requests Rate limit exceeded. Must include Retry-After header.

Read the full file on GitHub · 306 lines

Files

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.

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 · 306 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A 08ee6c6698e1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

errors-and-status-codes is a skill published in the GitHub repository oborchers/fractional-cto (29 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 3,292 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 2026-08-30.

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