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COMPEL Glossary / circuit-breaker-agent-tool
Circuit breaker (agent tool)
A circuit-breaker pattern applied specifically to agent tool calls: when a tool's failure rate exceeds a threshold, the breaker opens and blocks further calls to that tool.
What this means in practice
Distinct from general SRE circuit breakers because the break scope is per-tool-per-agent and the half-open state often requires human intervention.
Synonyms
agent tool circuit breaker , tool circuit breaker
See also
- Circuit Breaker — A circuit breaker is a resilience design pattern that automatically stops an AI system from sending requests to a failing downstream service or component when it detects a pattern of errors, preventing cascading failures and giving the failing component time to recover.
- Tool-call validation — A post-execution check that verifies the side effects of a tool call match expectations — with rollback capability where applicable.
- Runaway loop — An agentic incident class in which the agent recurses indefinitely without making progress — typically by re-invoking tools, re-planning without termination, or cycling through memory — until compute budget or token context is exhausted.
- Deadman switch — A fail-safe stop that halts the agent when heartbeats from supervising systems cease for a defined interval.