Circuit breaker

An automatic safeguard that stops sending requests to a failing AI component for a cool-down period and routes to a fallback instead, then cautiously tests recovery. It moves through closed, open, and half-open states. Prevents a failing component from being hammered into a cascade.

A stop with automatic trip conditions that acts on the environment rather than asking the actors to stop, exemplified by the market-wide trading halts strengthened after the 2010 Flash Crash. An agent's automatic trip conditions are a circuit breaker scaled to one deployment.

A hard, automatic limit on an action's cycles, cost, or time that forces a process to halt and escalate to a human once a defined threshold is crossed, the primary control this topic names for closing a compounding-effects gap.

A general engineering pattern (referenced by this topic's threshold-trigger mechanism) that automatically interrupts a process once a defined limit is crossed, preventing a runaway failure from continuing to compound.

A resilience pattern that stops calling a failing dependency after repeated failures and returns a fallback, then periodically tests for recovery, so one failed service does not cascade into a full outage.