Error Handling Patterns

Design error handling strategies that make failures explicit, recoverable, and debuggable. The central skill is matching error handling style to error semantics: not all errors are equal, and treating them equally produces systems that are equally bad at handling all of them.

When to Use

✅ Use for:

• Choosing between exceptions, Result types, or error codes for a domain
• Designing typed error hierarchies in TypeScript or Python
• Implementing retry logic with backoff, jitter, and circuit breaking
• Building React error boundaries and graceful degradation
• Structuring error information for both users and developers
• Python exception chaining and __cause__ / __context__ semantics

❌ NOT for:

• Debugging a specific runtime error (use debugger or domain skill)
• Logging pipeline infrastructure (use observability skill)
• APM/monitoring configuration (use site-reliability-engineer skill)
• Writing tests for error paths (use vitest-testing-patterns skill)