Ask Claude to Add Retry Logic and Circuit Breakers to Your External Service Calls

External services fail. APIs time out, rate limits trigger, and third-party outages cascade into your app. Claude Code can add resilience patterns to every external call, following your project's existing error handling conventions.

Find every external API call in src/services/. Add retry logic with 
exponential backoff for transient failures, timeout handling, and 
circuit breaker logic that stops calling a service after 5 consecutive failures.

Claude reads each integration, understands which errors are retryable (network timeouts, 429s, 503s) vs permanent (401s, 404s), and adds the right patterns:

// Claude adds resilience without changing business logic
const result = await retry(
  () => paymentApi.charge(amount),
  {
    maxRetries: 3,
    backoff: 'exponential',
    retryOn: [429, 502, 503, 'ECONNRESET', 'ETIMEDOUT'],
    onRetry: (error, attempt) => logger.warn('payment retry', { attempt, error }),
  }
);

Target different resilience needs:

# Add timeouts everywhere
Find all external HTTP calls that don't have a timeout set. 
Add a 5-second timeout to API calls and a 30-second timeout 
to file upload endpoints.

# Circuit breaker for a flaky service
The email service has been unreliable. Add a circuit breaker that 
opens after 3 failures, stays open for 60 seconds, then allows 
one test request before closing again.

# Fallback responses
When the recommendation engine is down, return cached recommendations 
instead of failing the whole page. Add graceful degradation.

# Idempotent retries
The payment API doesn't support idempotency keys by default. 
Add idempotency key generation to all payment requests so retries 
don't charge twice.

Every external call is a potential point of failure — let Claude add the retry logic, timeouts, and circuit breakers that keep your app running when dependencies don't.

via Claude Code