The "Happy Path" Fallacy

Most people build automations assuming everything will go right. The API will respond, the data will be formatted correctly, and the webhook will fire once.

In reality? APIs rate limit, users enter emojis in email fields, and webhooks retry 5 times.

Principles of Resilience

1. Idempotency

Your workflow should be able to run 10 times on the same data without creating 10 duplicate records. Always use "Search" before "Create".

2. Error Routing

Don't let a workflow just fail silently. Catch errors and route them to a dedicated Slack channel or an "Error Review" table in Airtable.

3. Data Validation

Never trust inputs. If you expect a phone number, validate it's E.164 format before passing it to Twilio.

4. Rate Limiting

Respect the API limits of your tools. Use sleep functions or queues (like RabbitMQ or n8n's wait node) to level out spikes in traffic.