Error Handling Design Review

Error Handling Design Review

Review error taxonomy, exception boundaries, timeouts, retry/backoff, circuit breaking, degradation, idempotency, transaction consistency, propagation, consumer contracts, telemetry, and recovery before implementation. It produces EH-## failure-mode findings and validation preparation; it does not run fault injection or review a real incident.

When to Use

• Use it to distinguish expected behavior, propagation, retry conditions, and human handoff across failure modes.
• Use it to check error messages/status, data consistency, telemetry, recovery, and consumer contracts.
• Use it when error handling is incomplete and a bounded first pass is needed.

Do not use it to execute fault injection, choose SLA/copy/risk acceptance for a Human, or treat code presence as correctness.

Output Format Options

• Use Markdown by default; when a table, CSV, or JSON is requested, preserve the same evidence, status, impact, owner, and validation fields.
• Do not present a structured format or static inventory as execution, pass, approval, or release evidence.

How to Use

1. Read this Skill's primary prompt and provide the objective, scope, material, environment, and available evidence.
2. Follow the prompt's input audit and output contract; deliver a bounded first pass when information is incomplete.
3. Retain source, evidence status, impact, owner role, close condition, and validation method for every finding.

Workflow

1. Read prompts/error-handling-design-review.md and audit objective, failure boundaries, version, sources, and evidence.
2. Classify input as known, missing, conflicting, stale, out_of_scope, and assumptions.
3. Build a failure-mode matrix and retain trigger, boundary, expected behavior, propagation, retry/fallback, and data impact in EH-## findings.
4. Separate facts, evidence-backed inferences, recommendations, and Human decisions; distinguish retryable, non-retryable, human-intervention, and safe-rejection paths.
5. Deliver a bounded first pass and minimum validation actions; one generic error response does not cover every path.

Core Constraints

• Do not run fault injection or claim a real incident, recovery, SLA, or error rate was verified.
• Do not treat exception classes, status codes, error-handling code, or document presence as behavior correctness.
• Each EH-## includes failure mode, trigger, boundary, expected behavior, propagation/translation, retry/fallback, data consistency, observable evidence, owner, and validation.
• Without identity, time, environment, inputs, and raw results, runtime status remains unverified, unexecuted, or unassessed.

Reference Files

• Always read prompts/error-handling-design-review.md before producing a review.
• For regression, read evals/eval.yaml and its cases; a design review is not incident analysis or fault injection.
• For trigger checks, use evals/trigger-prompts.csv and evals/local-rules.json; missing selection trace is BLOCKED.

Best Practices

• Prioritize high-impact gaps with a verifiable next action, using the smallest useful experiment or evidence request.
• Separate facts, evidence-backed inferences, recommendations, and Human decisions; never upgrade an assumption into a conclusion.

Delivery Checklist

• Complete the six input-audit categories and failure-scope statement.
• Distinguish retryable, non-retryable, human-intervention, and safe-rejection paths.
• Give every EH-## trigger, expected behavior, impact, owner, and validation.
• Check propagation, idempotency, data consistency, telemetry, and recovery.
• Do not treat one generic response or static code presence as a complete/correct design.

Common Pitfalls

• Using one “return an error” response for timeout, dependency, data-conflict, and authorization failures.
• Choosing retry counts without checking idempotency, backoff, budget, and duplicate side effects.
• Treating log presence as proof of recovery visibility or incident resolution.