AI-native development · Glossary term
What is Circuit Breaker?
A reliability control that temporarily stops calls to a dependency after failures cross a threshold, then probes whether the dependency has recovered.
Why does Circuit Breaker matter?
It prevents repeated model or tool failures from consuming latency, budget, and capacity across the rest of the system.
Circuit Breaker in practice
Open the breaker after repeated provider timeouts, fail over or return a controlled response, then allow a limited health probe after a cooldown.
What is the common confusion about Circuit Breaker?
A circuit breaker reacts to dependency health. A rate limit controls allowed request volume.
Learn Circuit Breaker in the course
Lessons that name Circuit Breaker in a title or section
- Kill Switches, Circuit Breakers, and Canary Tokens
A kill switch is a boolean held outside the agent's edit surface — a Redis key, a feature flag, a signed config — that disables the agent entirely.
- Caching, Rate Limiting & Cost Optimization
Most AI startups do not die from bad models. They die from bad unit economics. A single GPT-4o call costs fractions of a cent.
- The Tool Interface — Why Agents Need Structured I/O
A language model produces tokens. A program takes actions. The gap between those two is the tool interface: a contract that lets the model request an action and the host execute it.
Covered in Phase 11: LLM Engineering, Phase 13: Tools & Protocols and Phase 15: Autonomous Systems.
Related terms
- Retry with BackoffRepeating a failed transient operation after progressively longer delays, usually with randomized jitter and a strict retry limit.
- Rate LimitA policy that caps requests, tokens, concurrent work, or another resource within a defined time or capacity window.
- Model RouterA component that selects a model or provider for a request using requirements such as capability, latency, cost, context size, policy, and…
- BackpressureA flow-control mechanism that slows or rejects upstream work when a downstream component cannot process it safely at the current rate.
- Graceful DegradationPreserving a bounded core service when capacity or dependencies are impaired by reducing optional quality, features, freshness, or…
More terms in AI-native development
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