Your Agent Doesn't Need Better Retries, It Needs a Circuit Breaker
Every engineer who has worked in distributed systems knows the circuit breaker. The pattern is straightforward: if a dependency fails consistently, stop sending it requests. Give it time to recover. What makes it work is a single assumption — retries are useful only when the failure is transient. When the failure isn't transient, retrying makes the problem worse.
Agent systems have an analogous failure mode and, in my experience, few teams are applying circuit breaker logic to it. An agent reasoning incorrectly doesn't have a transient problem. The wrong context, the miscalibrated judgment, the misread tool response — none of those reset between retries. The agent will retry into the same wrong answer with the same confidence and the same cost, every single time, until something external stops it. And "something external" is usually an engineer reading a Slack alert at 2 AM wondering why the run that was supposed...
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