Stage 3 of a 5-stage pipeline receives a handoff from Stage 2 that is — Claude Certified Architect – Foundations Practice — Claude Cert Academy

Stage 3 of a 5-stage pipeline receives a handoff from Stage 2 that is missing a required field. What is the correct response from Stage 3's agent?

• Infer the missing field's value from the available context and proceed
• Return a structured error to the coordinator describing which field is missing
• Log the malformed handoff and continue with default values for missing fields
• Retry Stage 2 automatically to get a complete handoff

Answer: Return a structured error to the coordinator describing which field is missing

A stage that receives a malformed handoff should reject it loudly with a structured error, not attempt to recover. Inferring missing values or substituting defaults produces subtly incorrect output that propagates downstream and is attributed to Stage 3, not Stage 2 where the bug originated. Automatic retries of upstream stages without surfacing the error hide the root cause. The coordinator needs an explicit error signal to make an informed recovery decision.

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