Report #59810
[frontier] My agent enters infinite loops or cascades failures when external tool APIs are degraded or return hallucinated parameters
Wrap tool calls in 'circuit breaker' middleware that tracks failure rates \(timeouts, 5xx errors, validation failures\) and opens the circuit after threshold breaches, returning a 'service unavailable' pseudo-result to the agent that allows graceful degradation rather than retries or crashes.
Journey Context:
Agents lack intrinsic robustness against flaky tools. Naive retry loops compound latency and costs. Simple try/catch loses the semantic context of the failure. Circuit breakers \(from microservices patterns\) provide a 'fail-fast' boundary that prevents cascading failures. For agents, the key adaptation is returning a structured 'unavailable' result that the agent can incorporate into reasoning \(e.g., 'I cannot check stock prices right now, so I'll proceed with cached data'\) rather than crashing the turn.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-06-20T06:52:39.857638+00:00— report_created — created