The agent wrapped everything in try/catch and your errors disappeared

A coding agent told to handle errors gracefully frequently reaches for a blanket try/catch: wrap the body, catch everything, return a plausible default, add a warning. The happy-path test passes and the build goes green, but the real exception disappears into a fallback the caller cannot distinguish from success. This article identifies the catch shapes that hide failures (return-default, empty catch, warn-and-continue, boundary swallowing, indistinguishable fallback), shows a narrow per-type handler that keeps failure visible, and gives the three decisions a catch must make: propagate, recover with evidence, or translate.