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Circuit Breaker Pattern

Checked
aj-geddes·vlatest·other·MIT

This skill implements the Circuit Breaker pattern to prevent cascading failures by temporarily halting requests when a service is overwhelmed – boosting resilience.

Repository

Install on your platform

Showing Claude Code. One command installs this skill into any of the agents below.

  1. 1

    Run this in your project

    terminal
    $ npx skills add aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts --skill circuit-breaker-pattern -a claude-code

  2. Uses the open-source skills CLI and needs Node.js. Add -g to install it for your user instead of this project.

What we know about this skill

Publisher

aj-geddes

Taken from the source listing. We haven't verified who controls this account.

Install target

Live repository

Not pinned. Installing fetches whatever the repository holds at the time you run the command.

No human has reviewed this code. The checks below are a static scan of the files at one commit — nobody has run this skill or judged whether it works. A skill runs with whatever access you give your agent, so read the source before you install it.

Automated safety checks

scanned

This skill passed all 6 checks. We read its files at one commit and looked for the things that make a skill dangerous to run — not for whether it works.

  • Declares what it does: passed

    SKILL.md parses and declares a name and a description.

    SKILL.md exists, its frontmatter parses, and it declares a name and a description.

  • No undeclared network calls: passed

    Makes no network calls.

    Every host the skill dials — from its scripts, its config endpoints or the commands it tells the agent to run — is either well-known package and API infrastructure or declared in its own frontmatter. Links in documentation are not counted.

  • No obfuscated payloads: passed

    No encoded or obfuscated payloads.

    No base64, hex or compressed blob is decoded and then executed, and no encoded shell commands.

  • No credential access: passed

    Reads no keys, tokens, keychains or credential files.

    Neither the code nor the SKILL.md instructions read SSH keys, cloud credentials, keychains, token stores, browser cookie databases or dotfiles that hold secrets.

  • No pipe-to-shell installers: passed

    No pipe-to-shell or download-and-run installers.

    No `curl … | sh` pattern, in the code or in the instructions, that runs code fetched at run time.

  • Pinned to a commit: passed

    Scanned aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts at 3f5182cfd7.

    The exact upstream commit SHA that was scanned is recorded, so the result refers to specific bytes.

Commit
3f5182cfd7
Manifest
skills/circuit-breaker-pattern/SKILL.md
Scanned
8 files, 639 lines
This is a static scan, not a review. It reads the skill's files; it does not run them, and it cannot tell you whether the skill is any good or whether the code does what its description says. A skill runs with whatever access you give your agent.
What each check looks for →

About this skill

The circuit-breaker pattern allows AI agents to detect when a specific tool or API call is failing repeatedly and automatically stop invoking it for a set duration. This prevents cascading errors, saves computational resources, and forces the agent to switch strategies or retry later once the service recovers.

When to use it

  • Failing External APIs: Stop an agent from looping endlessly when a weather or payment API returns 503 errors.
  • Rate Limit Protection: Halt requests immediately after hitting a quota limit to avoid temporary bans.
  • Unstable Integrations: Pause interactions with flaky third-party services while the system stabilizes.
  • Resource Conservation: Prevent wasting tokens and compute cycles on doomed operations during high-load periods.

Key capabilities

  • Automatic invocation halting after consecutive failures.
  • Configurable cooldown periods before retry attempts resume.
  • State tracking to distinguish between transient and permanent errors.
  • Graceful degradation by switching to fallback tools or alternative logic.

Example prompts

  • "Implement a circuit breaker for my weather API that stops requests after 3 consecutive failures and retries after 5 minutes."
  • "Add a circuit breaker pattern to prevent my agent from spamming the payment gateway during high traffic."
  • "Configure a fallback mechanism that activates when the primary search engine returns errors too frequently."

Tips & gotchas

Ensure you define clear thresholds for failure counts and cooldown durations; setting them too low may cause unnecessary interruptions, while setting them too high delays recovery. Monitor the underlying service health to distinguish between temporary glitches and permanent outages before relying on automatic fallbacks.