principle-error-handling

What problem does it solve?

It prevents silent failures and confusing bugs by enforcing consistent error modeling, classification, wrapping, retry logic, timeouts, and boundary logging.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Error contracts that callers can reason about: use value-based errors (e.g., Go error, Rust Result, TypeScript typed errors) and reserve exceptions/panics for programmer errors.
• Correct handling strategies via classification: distinguish transient, permanent, and programmer errors to decide whether to retry, fail fast, or crash.
• Context-preserving error chains: wrap and propagate original causes so downstream diagnostics remain accurate.
• Retry/backoff with safety rails: apply exponential backoff with jitter, enforce retry budgets, and ensure idempotency before retrying.
• Deadline-aware reliability: propagate timeouts/deadlines correctly and return distinct timeout/deadline exceeded failures.
• Boundary logging discipline: log once at the layer that handles the error, and never log from libraries.
• Resilience patterns where needed: use circuit breakers and bulkheads to prevent cascading failures instead of over-retrying.

Quick Start

Ask an AI to review your function or API design for error classification, context-wrapping, retry/idempotency safety, timeout/deadline propagation, and log-once boundary placement for your target language.