# Error Handling Designer

> Use when the team needs a strategy for validation errors, API failures, job retries, user-facing error UX, observability, or recovery behavior. Trigger on requests to design error handling across frontend, backend, and integrations.

- Skill: `saranskumar/error-handling-designer` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add saranskumar/error-handling-designer`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/saranskumar/error-handling-designer/raw
- Safety review: PASS (external: skill-scanner PASS, skillspector PASS)
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Web & Frontend
- Author: saranskumar (https://skillmd.com/u/saranskumar)
- Updated: 2026-08-19
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/saranskumar/error-handling-designer

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# Goal
Design failure behavior so users can recover and operators can diagnose issues.

# When to Use
- A system spans multiple failure points.
- UX for failure or retry is unclear.
- Jobs, integrations, or AI calls can fail independently.

# Instructions
1. Enumerate failure classes: validation, auth, network, provider, data, and operator error.
2. Decide what the user sees, what is retried, and what is logged.
3. Define typed backend errors and client-facing messages.
4. Plan retry, dead-letter, and escalation behavior for async work.
5. Tie error handling to observability and supportability.

# Constraints
- Do not leak sensitive internals to end users.
- Do not rely only on generic toast messages for complex failures.
- Treat silent failure as a bug.

# Output Format
- Failure taxonomy
- User-facing behavior
- System behavior
- Retry/logging notes

# Examples
- "Design error handling for uploads and AI processing."
- "How should this app surface provider failures?"