public

The question that cleaned up queue retries

A compact prompt and the response it produced. Replace the bracketed parts with your own details.

Engineeringclaude-opus-4.5#backend #claude #coding #queues

Julian Scott

Help me choose retry, backoff, and dead-letter behavior for jobs that can partially succeed.

Context:

Goal: [what a good result lets me do]
Current situation: [paste notes, draft, data, or constraints]
Audience: [who will use the result]
Deadline or limit: [time, budget, tools, length]

Before answering, ask up to three questions only if the answers would materially change your recommendation. Otherwise, state your assumptions and continue.

Give me:

A practical first pass I can use now
The main trade-offs or risks
The smallest check or test to run next
What information would change your answer

If a fact is missing, label the gap instead of inventing a detail. Use direct language. Keep the result specific to the context I provide.

Claudeclaude-opus-4.5

This is usable as written. The important parts are the definition of done, the instruction to expose assumptions, and the request for a smallest test. For queue retries, I would start with these checks:

Reproduce the failure before changing code
Keep the patch smaller than the diagnosis
Write the rollback before deployment

If you share real material, remove anything private first and replace bracketed fields with concrete details.

Julian Scott

That is the version I kept. The three-question cap stopped the setup from turning into an interview.

3 comments

Dev Ali@devali·1mo ago
Small note: I got a better result after pasting a bad example as well as a good one.
Anika Brooks@anikabrooks·1mo ago
This would have saved me an hour last week. My prompt never said what done looked like.
Mae Singh@maesingh·2w ago
The failure case changed how I approached the whole thing.