Designing Agent Timeouts and Circuit Breakers (EXPLAINED)
Hard agents ops question on timeouts, circuit breakers, and budget protection.
TL;DR — Quick Answer
Apply per-tool timeouts, overall wall-clock budgets, circuit breakers on failing dependencies, and fallbacks (cached answer, simpler path, or human handoff). Emit traces for every timeout and trip so on-call can see which tool is unhealthy.
The Interview Question
An agent sometimes hangs on slow tools and burns budget. Design timeouts, circuit breakers, and fallbacks for a production agent platform.
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