How to fix it
- Return a real error status and message to the caller.
- Log the failure with enough context to debug it, without personal data.
- Add a test where the write fails and assert that the response says so.
Find the errors your app reports as success.
To make the red go away, the assistant wraps the call in try/catch and returns success anyway. The user sees “Saved”. The data never arrived.
npx @neuralaxis/vibedoctor scan What it looks like
It compiles. It ships. It’s wrong.
A swallowed error removes the only evidence that something went wrong. Logs stay clean and dashboards stay green.
Returning success after a failure is worse: the client believes it, and so does every retry and analytics event downstream.
} catch (error) {} await Promise.reject(new Error("write failed"));} catch (error) { return { ok: true }; }Example: fixtures/flow-swallowed in the VibeDoctor repository.
What VibeDoctor reports
A ranked finding with the exact location.
| Finding | Severity | Evidence | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Success response after a caught failure A catch block sends HTTP 2xx, ok: true, or success: true. In Python, an except block that returns 200 or success. | high | verified | flow-doctor |
| Swallowed error path An empty catch {} in JavaScript or TypeScript, or an except that only contains pass. | medium | verified | flow-doctor |
Evidence grades say how sure the finding is. What verified, observed and heuristic mean →
What this check can’t see
- It only looks inside catch and except blocks. A handler that returns 200 with an error message outside one is not flagged.
Fixing it, and the limits of this check
Run it
Check your repo now.
npx @neuralaxis/vibedoctor scan
Runs locally on JavaScript, TypeScript and Python repos. Hand the result to Cursor,
Claude Code, Codex or Copilot with agent-plan.
Agent setup →