Error Handling Audit

Find the places where failures disappear silently. No signup required.

Prerequisites

• None. Pure Claude Code — works in any repo, no MCP required.

Trigger

• "Audit error handling in this repo"
• "Where are we swallowing errors?"
• "Check exception handling on my changes"

Workflow

1. Scope: whole repo, a directory, or git diff (default to the diff if changes are pending).
2. Grep + read for these anti-patterns:

Patterns to flag

Swallowed / empty handlers

• except: pass, except Exception: pass, catch (e) {}, catch { }
• catch (e) { /* ignore */ } with no log, rethrow, or recovery

Over-broad catches

• except Exception / catch (Throwable) that hides bugs that should crash
• Catching then returning a default that masks the failure from the caller

Async / promise

• Floating promises: an async call not awaited and not .catch()-ed
• Promise.all where one rejection silently drops the rest of the work
• Missing top-level unhandledRejection / event-loop error handling

Network / IO

• fetch / HTTP client call with no timeout
• No retry/backoff on a flaky external call
• File/socket opened without a finally/with/defer cleanup

Observability

• Error caught and logged but the caller gets a success/200 anyway
• logger.error(e) without the stack/context, so it can't be triaged

3. For each finding give file:line, the risk (what failure becomes invisible), and the fix.
4. Output:

## Error Handling Audit — services/ (diff)

**2 swallowed, 1 floating promise, 1 missing timeout**

### Swallowed errors
- `services/sync.py:74` — `except Exception: pass` around the DB write.
  A failed write is now invisible; the job reports success. Log + re-raise.
- `static/js/upload.js:30` — `catch {}` on the upload. User sees nothing on failure.

### Async
- `services/queue.js:51` — `flushMetrics()` is called without `await` or `.catch`.
  A rejection becomes an unhandledRejection. Await it or attach a handler.

### Network
- `clients/openai.py:22` — `httpx.post(...)` has no timeout. A hung upstream
  blocks the worker indefinitely. Add `timeout=30` + one retry.

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