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Code Quality · Version 1.3.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

Error Handling Reviewer

Make a defensible decision about exception-boundary review and retry classification with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

4 method steps 5 documented failure modes 4 diagnostic checks 7 quality gates

Reviews exception boundaries, result types, retries, context preservation, user-safe messages, cleanup, and observability across service code.

₹99 one-time

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What this skill helps you do

  • Exception-boundary review
  • Retry classification
  • Error-context preservation

How Error Handling Reviewer works

You provide

The code, its invariants, and how failures currently surface

It inspects

Error paths and lifetime handling for exception-boundary review

It decides

A retry classification change that makes invalid states unrepresentable

You verify

A deliberately invalid input fails clearly at the boundary

What it checks first

Error Handling Reviewer reviews exception boundaries, result types, retries, context preservation, user-safe messages, cleanup, and observability across service code. Use it when the work involves Exception-boundary review, Retry classification, Error-context preservation.

  1. Whether errors are handled where they can be resolved or merely passed upward with less context.
  2. Whether types make invalid states unrepresentable or merely document intent.
  3. Ownership and lifetime of resources, and whether every path releases what it acquired.
  4. Whether abstractions hide complexity or relocate it somewhere harder to inspect.

Failure modes it recognizes

  • A caught exception logged and swallowed, allowing execution to continue with invalid state.
  • Error types collapsed into a single generic type, losing the ability to handle cases differently.
  • Nullable fields encoding several distinct meanings, forcing every caller to guess.
  • A helper abstraction with one caller, which adds indirection without removing duplication.
  • Silent coercion masking a type mismatch until it surfaces as corrupt data.

Answers it will reject

  • Rewriting for elegance without a behavioral test suite, which converts known code into unknown risk.
  • Adding a lint rule to enforce a pattern nobody has justified.
  • Treating warnings as noise, which trains the team to ignore the one that matters.

Decision rules it applies

  • Fail fast on invalid state rather than continuing with a defaulted value.
  • Encode invariants in types and constraints where the language allows it.
  • Prefer local clarity over global cleverness; the reader is the constraint.

Evidence it asks for

  • Confirm each error path is exercised by a test rather than assumed correct.
  • Check that a deliberately invalid input produces a clear failure at the boundary.
  • Compare behavior before and after refactoring with characterization tests.

The method inside

  1. Map the artifact, actors, boundaries, and invariants relevant to exception-boundary review.
  2. Trace concrete failure or abuse paths for retry classification; do not report checklist items without a mechanism.
  3. Prioritize error-context preservation findings by impact, likelihood, confidence, and cost of correction.
  4. Recommend the smallest defensible change, then define how an independent reviewer can verify it.

Deliverables

  • Exception-boundary review assessment
  • Retry classification decision and action plan
  • Error-context preservation verification checklist

Evidence requirements

  • Functional and quality requirements
  • Scale, latency, consistency, cost, and compliance constraints
  • Current topology and alternatives considered

Quality gates

  • Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
  • The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
  • No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
  • Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
  • The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
  • The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
  • No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.

Example task

Input

Review this service error-handling approach; production logs are noisy and callers receive inconsistent status codes.

Expected output

Infrastructure errors are translated in three layers, losing the original cause while duplicating logs. Define one boundary for protocol mapping, preserve typed causes internally, and log once with request context...

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Exception-boundary review: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Retry classification: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Error-context preservation: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.

Out of scope

  • Producing a generic reference architecture without requirements
  • Hiding material trade-offs behind best-practice language

Agent compatibility

  • GitHub Copilot custom agents
  • Claude Agent Skills / SKILL.md
  • Any instruction-following chat model

Tool policy: Advisory by default. No tools are assumed. If the host provides tools, use read-only evidence gathering unless the user explicitly approves a scoped write or execution action.