# Prompting For Error Handling That Is Not Just try/catch

> Named error classes, correlation IDs, and a rule about what never reaches the client.

- **Author:** [Dmytro Shevchenko (@dmytro_shevchenko)](https://www.promptabide.com/dmytro_shevchenko)
- **Published:** 2026-04-04
- **Updated:** 2026-08-22
- **Tags:** `backend`, `node`, `error-handling`, `reliability`
- **Views:** 6208
- **Likes:** 582

## Prompt

```
Ask for "error handling" and you get try/catch wrapped around everything with console.log in the catch. Ask for this instead:

"Add error handling to this module. Requirements:
- A small hierarchy: AppError base, then ValidationError, NotFoundError, ConflictError, ExternalServiceError
- Each carries an HTTP status and a machine-readable code
- One central Express error middleware maps them to responses
- Unknown errors become a 500 with a correlation ID; the real message goes to the logger, never to the client
- Stack traces only when NODE_ENV !== production
- External calls get a timeout and one retry with backoff; a retry exhaustion is an ExternalServiceError, not a 500"

The line that earns its place is "the real message goes to the logger, never to the client". Without it you leak table names in 500 bodies.
```

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