Summary
A recoverable failure is unfinished business. If the company still owes a decision, a correction, or a follow-up, the system needs to preserve that fact as structured operational state. An exception can stop a process. It cannot, by itself, coordinate the repair.
Problem
Operational workflows meet missing mappings, ambiguous identities, incomplete artifacts, and mismatches with external systems. These are not all software defects. They are moments when the available evidence cannot justify the next business action.
Treating every one as a generic exception strips away the distinction. Retrying may repeat the same uncertainty. Logging may preserve a clue, but it leaves a person to discover the clue, reconstruct the context, and decide what to do. Human memory becomes the recovery system.
Principle
Use visible failures for programmer mistakes, authorization failures, and violated invariants. Represent expected business ambiguity with issues, signals, review tasks, diagnostics, and run artifacts that preserve evidence and a repair path.
Platform Shape
Human review and repair are OLTP-backed stateful operations. When an automated step cannot proceed safely, it should produce something visible and resumable: what failed, which scoped entity it affected, what evidence exists, and what an operator can do next. Batch work can continue around item-level ambiguity while recording the partial result honestly.
The same contract matters for agents. An agent can reason over issues, evidence, and allowed actions. It cannot recover context that vanished into private control flow. Making failure explicit is what lets humans and agents share the same operating surface without giving either one a hidden path around it.
Tradeoffs
This requires schemas, lifecycle rules, deduplication, and ownership. Not every exception deserves an issue, and turning programmer errors into apparent business outcomes would make the system less honest. The boundary takes judgment. When drawn well, the platform can pause, explain itself, and resume without asking a person to reconstruct the past.