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The circuit breaker is a resilience pattern that protects a system from cascading failures: when calls to a service fail repeatedly, the breaker trips and blocks subsequent calls for a period, returning an immediate error instead of hammering a dying service. Like the breaker panel at home, it temporarily sacrifices one function to save the whole installation.
The pattern has three states: closed (calls pass through normally, failures are counted), open (past the failure threshold, calls are rejected instantly) and half-open (after a cooldown, a few probe calls check whether the service has recovered; if so the breaker closes again, if not it reopens). This gives the struggling service room to breathe and recover.
In AI, circuit breakers shield applications from provider instability: if a model returns bursts of errors, the breaker trips and the LLM gateway reroutes traffic to an alternative model or serves a degraded response. In agents it prevents infinite loops of calls to broken tools. Beyond AI it is a pillar of microservices architectures, popularized by Netflix's Hystrix library (2012).
The name comes from electrical engineering: the automatic switch that opens a circuit on overload, whose modern version was patented by the German engineer Hugo Stotz in 1924. As a software pattern it was described and named by Michael Nygard in his 2007 book Release It!, now a classic of resilience engineering.
In Grace's professional scenarios on AI systems in production you learn to anticipate vendor failures and ask the AI for fallback strategies: the circuit breaker is the pattern to name. The 7 evaluation dimensions recognize prompts that demonstrate this systems thinking.
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