# Make background jobs and webhooks safe to retry

Designs idempotency, retries, and dead-letter handling so jobs, queue consumers, and webhooks never double-charge or lose work.

- Topic: Software Development
- Framework: Few-Shot
- Level: Standard
- Tags: Coding, Write, Analyze, Fill-in Template
- Source: https://www.thinkwithprompt.com/prompts/make-background-jobs-and-webhooks-safe-to-retry

## Prompt

```text
Help me make a background job, queue consumer, or webhook handler safe to retry.

**What it does:** [e.g. "charges a card and sends a receipt", "syncs orders to the warehouse"]
**Code:** [PASTE THE HANDLER]
**Trigger and delivery:** [QUEUE OR WEBHOOK PROVIDER, AND WHETHER DELIVERY IS AT-LEAST-ONCE]
**Side effects:** [DATABASE WRITES, EXTERNAL API CALLS, EMAILS, PAYMENTS]
**Current retry behavior:** [WHAT HAPPENS ON FAILURE TODAY]
**What's gone wrong:** [e.g. "duplicate emails", "jobs stuck", "silently dropped events" - or "nothing yet, preventing it"]

Analyze:
1. What happens if the handler runs twice, runs concurrently with itself, or crashes halfway through each step.
2. Which side effects are naturally idempotent and which aren't.

Then design:
- **Idempotency:** an idempotency key (where it comes from, where it's stored, how long), and a pattern to check and record it atomically with the work. Use idempotency keys on external API calls where the provider supports them [CONFIRM provider support].
- **Ordering:** whether out-of-order delivery matters and how to handle it (version numbers, timestamps, re-fetching current state).
- **Retries:** which errors are retryable vs. permanent, exponential backoff with jitter, a maximum number of attempts.
- **Dead-letter handling:** where failed messages go, alerting, and how to safely replay them.
- **Webhooks specifically:** signature verification, responding quickly and processing asynchronously, replay protection.

Return the rewritten handler as code, a failure-scenario table (scenario, current behavior, new behavior), and tests to add.
```

## What to fill in

- PASTE THE HANDLER
- DATABASE WRITES, EXTERNAL API CALLS, EMAILS, PAYMENTS
- WHAT HAPPENS ON FAILURE TODAY
- CONFIRM provider support

Free to copy and use. From ThinkWithPrompt (https://www.thinkwithprompt.com/), a library of 2,663 curated AI prompts.