fix-errors
Guidelines for fixing unhandled errors from the VS Code error telemetry dashboard. Use when investigating error-telemetry issues with stack traces, error messages, and hit/user counts. Covers tracing data flow through call stacks, identifying producers of invalid data vs. consumers that crash, enriching error messages for telemetry diagnosis, and avoiding common anti-patterns like silently swallowing errors.
Install
Install this Claude and Codex skill with the command below. The command stays visible even when copy support is unavailable.
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vscode /tmp/vscode && ln -s /tmp/vscode/.github/skills/fix-errors ~/.claude/skills/fix-errorsFrom README
Approach Do NOT fix at the crash site The error manifests at a specific line in the stack trace, but the fix almost never belongs there. Fixing at the crash site (e.g., adding a typeof guard in a revive() function, swallowing the error with a try/catch, or returning a fallback value) only masks the real problem. The invalid data still flows through the system and will cause failures elsewhere. Trace the data flow upward through the call stack Read each frame in the stack trace from bottom to top. For each frame, understand: What data is being passed and what is expected Where that data originated (IPC message, extension API call, storage, user input, etc.) Whether the data could have been corrupted or malformed at that point The goal is to find the producer of invalid data, not the consumer that crashes on it. When the producer cannot be identified from the stack alone Sometimes the stack trace only shows the receiving/consuming side (e.g., an IPC server handler).