Error Recovery

Value: Courage -- autonomous operation requires resilience. Recovering from errors without human intervention keeps the workflow moving. Knowing when to escalate prevents wasted effort on unrecoverable situations.

Purpose

Teaches agents to handle unexpected errors during autonomous operation (API failures, build tool crashes, permission issues, resource exhaustion). Provides classification, retry strategies, and escalation rules. Prevents the failure modes of infinite retry loops, silent error swallowing, and unnecessary human interruptions for recoverable issues.

Practices

Classify Before Acting

When an error occurs, classify it before attempting recovery: