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A safety switch that halts an agent or tool call after repeated failures instead of hammering away.
Borrowed from electronics and microservices, a circuit breaker tracks failures and, once they cross a threshold, 'trips' — short-circuiting further attempts for a cooldown so a broken dependency or looping agent doesn't burn tokens, money, or rate limits. It's essential because an agent in a bad loop will happily retry the same failing call 500 times. Example: after a flaky API returns errors five times in a row, the breaker opens and the agent fails fast or routes to a fallback instead of retrying.
Plainly
Think of Circuit Breaker as the checklist that keeps the app open for real people. A safety switch that halts an agent or tool call after repeated failures instead of hammering away.
In practice
Use it when a change has to survive deploys, users, incidents, analytics, or billing reality. In practice, define the owner, input, output, and failure mode before you rely on it.