My MCP Server's Two API Helpers Had Zero except Blocks. Every Bad Call Crashed With a Raw urllib Traceback.

I've spent the last few weeks hardening one function in my MCP server's claude -p wrapper. First a timeout fix. Then it turned out the timeout fix didn't cover a non-zero exit code. Then it turned out that fix still didn't cover a missing binary. Three separate posts, three separate except clauses, all on the same six-line try block, until _claude() finally had a clean, consistent failure path: catch everything plausible, return a string prefixed ERROR:, never let a raw exception reach the MCP c