MCP Circuit Breaker: Preventing Cascading Failures in AI Tool Calls
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We designed NeuroLink’s MCP circuit breaker because a single flaky Jira MCP server was taking down entire AI agent workflows. One tool returning timeouts should not cascade into every other tool call queuing up behind it, exhausting connection pools, and eventually crashing the whole system. The circuit breaker pattern – borrowed from electrical engineering and popularized by Michael Nygard’s “Release It!” – gives us a clean abstraction for isolating failures and letting the system heal itself.