Claude Code error handling: what to ask for and what to delete

Left to its defaults, Claude wraps nearly everything in try-catch. Null checks for values that can't be null. Handlers for errors that can never happen. The code looks defensive. It's actually noise. Tell Claude which errors actually matter The generic "add appropriate error handling" prompt produces generic error handling. What works better: Add error handling for: - Network timeouts on the fetch call - Malformed JSON in the response - Missing required fields in the parsed data Do NOT add null checks for values guaranteed by the TypeScript types. Claude follows this well. You get handling for real failure modes instead of defensive checks for impossible states. Fail-fast vs degrade-gracefully These are different strategies and Claude will pick one if you don't specify. For a config loader that runs at startup, failing fast is correct — you want to know immediately if the config is bad. For a dashboard widget fetching non-critical data, graceful degradation is right — show a fallback,