Course Overview: What You’ll Learn in AI Error Handling and Resilience: Retries, Timeouts, and Circuit Breakers

VCP

Course Overview · Free Preview

Welcome to AI Error Handling and Resilience: Retries, Timeouts, and Circuit Breakers

A practical, hands-on course built for the way you actually work in 2026. Below is exactly what you’ll get and why it’s worth your time.

What You Will Learn

The four failure modes every networked call has, and which to handle first
Timeout budgets: total, per-attempt, and connection — and how to set them sanely
Retry strategy that doesn't make outages worse (jitter, budgets, idempotency keys)
Circuit breakers in plain code without pulling in Hystrix
Bulkheads, rate limiters, and load shedding for graceful degradation
Error taxonomies for LLM API calls and other AI-specific failures
How to use Claude/Cursor to generate resilience code that's actually correct

Full Course Breakdown

This free preview is Lesson 1. The lessons below are unlocked when you join the course.

Lesson 2

Four Failure Modes: Timeout, Error, Slow, Partial

Before you write a single line of resilience code, name what you're protecting against. Almost every outage I've debugged in 10 years comes down to one of four failure modes — and most code only handles two.

Lesson 3

Timeout Budgets: Total, Per-Attempt, and Connection

If you only set one timeout, you set the wrong one. Production-grade resilience needs three: connection timeout, per-attempt timeout, and total deadline. Here's how to pick numbers and propagate them.

Lesson 4

Retries Without Causing the Outage You're Recovering From

Naive retries during an outage are how a slow upstream becomes a dead upstream. This lesson covers exponential backoff, jitter, retry budgets, and the question you must answer first: is this call idempotent?

Lesson 5

Circuit Breakers in 30 Lines (Without Hystrix)

A circuit breaker stops you from hammering an upstream that's already down. Most engineers think this needs a heavyweight library. It doesn't. Here's a complete pattern in pseudo-code.

Lesson 6

Bulkheads, Rate Limiters, and Load Shedding

Resilience isn't only what you do when an upstream fails. It's also how you prevent your own service from melting under unexpected load. Bulkheads, rate limits, and shedding are the three tools.

Lesson 7

LLM-Specific Failures: Streams, Token Limits, and Content Filters

LLM APIs introduce failure modes that classic resilience playbooks don't cover. Streams cut mid-token, content filters return partial outputs, and rate limits use weird header schemes. Here's the LLM-specific layer to add on top.

Lesson 8

Testing Resilience: Chaos, Fault Injection, and Load

Untested resilience is hope, not engineering. This lesson covers three test types that catch real outages before they reach production: fault injection, chaos experiments, and sustained load tests.

Who This Course Is For

Backend engineers maintaining services that call other services
Platform and SRE engineers tired of cascading failures during incidents
Anyone building systems on top of LLM APIs (rate limits, timeouts, partial failures)
Founders running production services that can't afford a 3am page
Engineers using AI assistants who keep generating naive try/catch code

What Makes This Course Different

Real production patterns, not toy examples
LLM-specific failure modes (token limits, partial streams, content filter) as a first-class topic
Circuit breaker shown in pseudo-code first, then 5 languages
Every pattern paired with how to test it (chaos / load / fault injection)
Pairs cleanly with the existing Caching, Rate Limiting, and Observability courses

Every lesson is hands-on, evergreen, and tool-agnostic where it matters — the patterns work whether you’re using Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or the next thing.

Ready to Get Started?

8 lessons. $9.99. One-time.

Lifetime access. No subscriptions. Practical material you can use today.

Enroll on this page to unlock Lessons 2–8.