Originally published at claudeguide.io/claude-agent-error-handling

How to Handle Errors and Retries in Claude Agent SDK

Production Claude agents fail in predictable ways — rate limit errors (429), overload errors (529), network timeouts, tool call failures, and infinite loops. Each requires a different recovery strategy, and the difference between a production-grade agent and a fragile prototype is having all five handled correctly. This guide covers every error type, the right retry strategy for each, and the circuit breaker pattern that prevents cascading failures.

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The Error Taxonomy

Claude Agent SDK errors fall into five categories:

Category	HTTP Status	Cause	Retry?
Rate limit	429	Too many requests	Yes, with backoff
Overloaded	529	API server busy	Yes, with backoff
Auth error	401	Bad API key	No — fix the key
Invalid request	400	Bad parameters	No — fix the code
Network failure	No status	Connection dropped	Yes, immediately
Tool failure	N/A	Your tool code crashed	Depends
Agent loop	N/A	Agent running forever	Kill after max turns

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Base Error Handling Setup

Start with this error handling wrapper before building anything else:

python
import anthropic
import time
import random
from typing import Callable, TypeVar

client = anthropic.Anthropic()
T = TypeVar("T")


def with_retry(
    fn: Callable[[], T],
    max_retries: int = 3,
    base_delay: float = 1.0,
    max_delay: float = 60.0,
) -

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