Error Handling & Recovery

Turn every failure into a guided path forward: find each way the app can fail, give it a specific human message, a correct placement, and at least one recovery action. The prime directive: never blame the user, and never leave them at a dead end — every error state ships with a way out. Deliver an error-state matrix covering the failure modes plus the implemented components and copy — not messaging guidelines alone.

When to use / when not to

Use for: error message copy, validation UX, network/offline failure handling, permission-denied and 404 pages, recovery workflows, graceful degradation, error accessibility.

Hand off instead when the real need is:

• Preventing the wait/failure in the first place (retries as performance, optimistic rollback mechanics) → skills/frontend-design/performance-optimization
• The loading half of the async lifecycle (skeletons, spinners, empty states) → skills/frontend-design/loading-states — this skill owns what happens when loading fails
• Error animation timing → skills/frontend-design/interaction-physics
• Full accessibility audit beyond error surfaces → skills/frontend-design/accessibility-excellence

Step 0 — Inspect the codebase, then ask only what's left