Promptles
Errors & Proof

Keep Failures Independent

When one job feeds several channels, make each succeed or fail on its own, and retry without sending twice.

When one job feeds several channels, like an alert that goes to email and to Slack, a failure in one shouldn't block or repeat the others. Say that each channel succeeds or fails on its own, and how a retry should avoid sending anything twice. Vague: "Email and Slack the on-call team about each urgent ticket." Specific: "Email and Slack the on-call team about each urgent ticket. Track each channel separately: if email is down, Slack still goes out once, and email retries later without re-posting to Slack. Simulate an email outage and show me what each channel did."

Where you'll practice this

One Promptles scenario teaches this principle directly.

  • Alert On-Call by Email and Slack

    Every urgent support ticket should reach the on-call person two ways: an email to `oncall@brightdesk.com` and a post in `#urgent-support` on Slack. A script, `alerts.js`, checks for new urgent tickets every 5 minutes and ticks one 'notified' box per ticket once it has alerted.…

Other principles in Errors & Proof