Claude Code Subagent Error Recovery in 2026: Retry Logic, Fallback Strategies, and Detecting Stuck Loops

This article was written with the assistance of AI, under human supervision and review.

Most production agent failures trace back to a single omission: the absence of recovery logic. A subagent hits a rate limit, retries the same call immediately, burns through budget, and crashes the parent workflow. The coordinator receives a cryptic timeout after 90 seconds and has no idea which step failed or why.

Effective error recovery classifies failures by type, applies exponential backoff to transient issues, detects stuck loops before they drain budget, and propagates only the errors that require coordinator intervention.…