In real systems, something is always failing. An API times out. A database slows down. A third-party service returns garbage. If your system depends on everything working perfectly, it won’t last long in production. So the goal is not preventing failure. It’s designing so failure doesn’t break everything. The wrong assumption A lot of systems are built like this: Step 1 → Step 2 → Step 3 → Done If Step 2 fails, the whole flow stops. In controlled environments, this works. In production, it creates fragile systems that break on the first issue. What we do instead We design flows that can survive failure and continue. Not perfectly. But safely. 1. Break the dependency chain Instead of one long synchronous flow, we split things into independent steps. Each step: does one thing stores its state can be retried So if something fails, you don’t lose everything. You just retry that part. ## 2. Accept partial success This one is uncomfortable at first.…