What is circuit-breaker-pattern?

A reliability pattern that temporarily stops calls to a failing external service, then tests whether the service has recovered before allowing normal traffic again. A fallback is an alternate response or action used when the service cannot be reached.

Use it around external APIs, databases, microservices, and third-party integrations to detect failures, apply timeouts, limit damage from repeated errors, and provide fallbacks.

It prevents repeated failures in one dependency from spreading through the rest of an application and gives the dependency time to recover.

circuit-breaker-pattern — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by aj-geddes

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts --skill circuit-breaker-pattern

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/circuit-breaker-pattern/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/circuit-breaker-pattern)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/circuit-breaker-pattern"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/circuit-breaker-pattern/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/circuit-breaker-pattern"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/circuit-breaker-pattern.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 595 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

Socket pass 16 Sept 2026
Snyk pass 16 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00037	$0.00595
Opus 5.5	$0.00015	$0.00238
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00007	$0.00119
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00060

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 3bad366e9097, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

circuit-breaker-pattern scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/validate-api.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/circuit-breaker-pattern/SKILL.md · 102 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 102 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Overview

Implement circuit breaker patterns to prevent cascading failures and provide graceful degradation when dependencies fail.

When to Use

External API calls
Microservices communication
Database connections
Third-party service integrations
Preventing cascading failures
Implementing fallback mechanisms
Rate limiting protection
Timeout handling

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

enum CircuitState {
  CLOSED = "CLOSED",
  OPEN = "OPEN",
  HALF_OPEN = "HALF_OPEN",
}

interface CircuitBreakerConfig {
  failureThreshold: number;
  successThreshold: number;
  timeout: number;
  resetTimeout: number;
}

interface CircuitBreakerStats {
  failures: number;
  successes: number;
  consecutiveFailures: number;
  consecutiveSuccesses: number;
  lastFailureTime?: number;
}

class CircuitBreaker {
  private state: CircuitState = CircuitState.CLOSED;
  private stats: CircuitBreakerStats = {
    failures: 0,
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide	Contents
TypeScript Circuit Breaker	TypeScript Circuit Breaker
Circuit Breaker with Monitoring	Circuit Breaker with Monitoring
Opossum-Style Circuit Breaker (Node.js)	Opossum-Style Circuit Breaker (Node.js)
Python Circuit Breaker	Python Circuit Breaker
Resilience4j-Style (Java)	Resilience4j-Style (Java)

Best Practices

✅ DO

Use appropriate thresholds for your use case
Implement fallback mechanisms
Monitor circuit breaker states
Set reasonable timeouts
Use exponential backoff
Log state transitions
Alert on frequent trips
Test circuit breaker behavior
Use per-dependency breakers
Implement health checks

Read the full file on GitHub · 102 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 102 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 3bad366e9097

Subscribe to this mod's changes

circuit-breaker-pattern is a skill published in the GitHub repository aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts (376 stars, last pushed 8mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 595 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Backend and APIs

circuit-breaker-pattern next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
circuit-breaker-patternaj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts	Skill	376	8mo ago	MIT	A	37	Claude Code, Codex
mem0-oss-to-platformmem0ai/mem0	Skill	68k	2d ago	Apache-2.0	A	217	Claude Code, Codex
azure-mgmt-botservice-dotnetmicrosoft/skills	Skill	3.2k	yesterday	MIT	A	78	Claude Code
fastapi-router-pymicrosoft/skills	Skill	3.2k	yesterday	MIT	A	46	Claude Code
dev-runtimelangwatch/langwatch	Skill	5.0k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	172	Claude Code
api-designericrisco/rsc-harness	Skill	503	2d ago	MIT	A	105	Claude Code, Codex
migrate-segw-to-raparc-mcp/arc-1	Skill	252	yesterday	MIT	A	106	Claude Code

circuit-breaker-pattern