Error Recovery

Version: 1.0.0 Purpose: Patterns for handling failures in multi-agent workflows Status: Production Ready

Overview

Error recovery is the practice of handling failures gracefully in multi-agent workflows, ensuring that temporary errors, timeouts, or partial failures don't derail entire workflows. In production systems with external dependencies (AI models, APIs, network calls), failures are inevitable. The question is not "will it fail?" but "how will we handle it when it does?"

This skill provides battle-tested patterns for:

• Timeout handling (external models taking >30s)
• API failure recovery (401, 500, network errors)
• Partial success strategies (some agents succeed, others fail)
• User cancellation (graceful Ctrl+C handling)
• Missing tools (claudish not installed)
• Out of credits (payment/quota errors)
• Retry strategies (exponential backoff, max retries)