Error Handling & Recovery Flows

Overview

An error state is a fork where the product either keeps the user's trust and work, or loses both. Every error must answer three questions: what happened (in human terms), how to fix it, and where the user's work went — and the answer to the last one must be "nowhere, it's safe."

When to Use

• Building any surface that can fail: forms, saves, payments, uploads, network calls, agent runs
• Adding delete, archive, cancel, overwrite, or send actions
• Designing offline or flaky-network behavior; building 404/500 pages
• NOT for: validation timing and error summaries inside forms — see flow-forms
• NOT for: logging/observability plumbing with no user-facing surface

The Proven Flow