When Claude API Streaming Stops Without an Error: Detecting Silent Stalls and Resuming Mid-Stream
How to catch the 'silent stall' where Claude API streaming stops with no exception at all, using a content-level watchdog that times the gap between tokens, plus a resume path that carries received text forward as an assistant prefill, and a four-layer timeout budget for long-running automation.
The Day a Non-Responding MCP Call Swallowed an Entire Unattended Run — Owning the Stop With Your Own Deadline
When a remote MCP tool call stops responding, an unattended scheduled run just keeps waiting. Instead of leaving the cutoff entirely to the platform, here is how I designed my own deadline and a per-connector circuit breaker to own the stop — with working code.
Noticing From the Outside When a Scheduled Job Quietly Did Nothing
exit 0, but zero output. How to catch a silent no-op not from the job's own log but from an external heartbeat ledger and ground truth, written from running several sites on a nightly schedule as an indie developer.
Trusting Claude's Structured Output in Production — Validation Gates and Repair Loops
When Claude's structured output breaks 'occasionally' in production, combine tool-use enforcement, a schema validation gate, a single repair loop, and a graceful degradation fallback to eliminate broken JSON from your operations — with working TypeScript code.
Making Claude Agent SDK Tools Idempotent — Stopping Double Execution with Deterministic Keys and an Outbox
An implementation log for stopping a Claude Agent SDK retry or session resume from processing the same payment twice. Three patterns — deterministic idempotency keys, an outbox, and a lightweight wrapper — with runnable code and production metrics.
Running Claude Code Hooks as a Quality Gate Without Breaking Your Pipeline
An implementation note on running Claude Code Hooks as a safety valve for automation: when to block with exit code 2 versus JSON output, how to keep formatters from looping or over-blocking, and how to log every hook firing so misfires are traceable.
A Three-Tier fallbackModel Setup for Claude Code — Keeping Unattended Runs Alive Through Overload Mornings
How I run Claude Code with a three-tier fallbackModel chain so overnight batches survive overload errors: logging which model actually ran, measuring quality drift on fallback days, and pairing it with deny rules.
Guard Your Agent's Destructive Operations with Pre- and Post-condition Contracts
A design for wrapping an autonomous agent's writes in deterministic pre- and post-condition checks. A contract gate stops the destructive operations that better prompts can never reliably prevent.
Implementing the Transactional Outbox Pattern with Claude Agent SDK — Eliminating Lost Side Effects in Production
Stop the 'the row was inserted but the email never went out' class of bugs in Claude Agent SDK apps. A production-grade walkthrough of the Transactional Outbox pattern using Postgres and Cloudflare Queues.
Decoding Claude's 'Spanner Temporarily Unavailable' Error and How to Handle It
The 'Spanner temporarily unavailable' error occasionally appears in Claude API and Claude.ai responses. This guide unpacks what the message reveals about Anthropic's infrastructure and walks through practical retry strategies that production teams actually use.
Running the Claude API in Python Production — Rate Limits, Retries, and Timeouts
If you put Claude API into a real backend service, how you handle 429, 503, and read timeouts decides your reliability ceiling. This is the design I settled on after operating it in production.