Error Handling

Consistent errors reduce support load and on-call pain. Design a taxonomy, stable codes, safe user messaging, and operator visibility—without leaking secrets or stack traces to clients.

When to Offer This Workflow

Trigger conditions:

• Inconsistent HTTP status codes and response bodies
• Retry storms or duplicate side effects from naive retries
• Logs that cannot be tied to user-visible failures

Initial offer:

Use six stages: (1) classify errors, (2) map to transport, (3) user messaging, (4) retries & idempotency, (5) observability, (6) client SDKs & DX). Confirm REST/GraphQL/gRPC and sync/async patterns.

Stage 1: Classify Errors