Will circuit breakers hide real issues with the model or vendor?

No—if you instrument correctly. Open breakers should raise alerts and attach context in traces (failure rate, codes, latency). Breakers buy you time and reduce blast radius; observability ensures you still see the root cause and act.

How do I detect hallucinations automatically?

Validate outputs against strict schemas, cross-check with retrieval citations, and run lightweight classifiers on claims (e.g., regexes for policy IDs, whitelist of allowed enums). Track validator-fail rate as a first-class metric and trigger fallback or human review on fail.

What’s a pragmatic way to monitor drift?

Bucket embeddings and compute PSI/KL divergence week over week; correlate with offline eval scores and production validator-fail rate. Alert when PSI > 0.25 or your eval SLOs drop. Canary new model/prompt variants behind flags before full rollout.

When should I escalate to a human?

On repeated validator failures, low confidence, or risky content categories (compliance, medical, financial advice). Make the threshold explicit (e.g., 2 consecutive fails or confidence < 0.5) and log the decision with request IDs for auditability.

Aren’t retries enough?

Retries help transient errors, but they make latency spikes worse and can amplify vendor throttling. Use retries sparingly, with backoff and jitter, and always combined with timeouts and a breaker to avoid retry storms.

Ai-delivery · Nov 23, 2025 · 8 minute read

The Circuit Breakers Your LLM Stack Should’ve Had Before Last Friday’s Pager Storm

Q: Aren’t retries enough?

Retries help transient errors, but they make latency spikes worse and can amplify vendor throttling. Use retries sparingly, with backoff and jitter, and always combined with timeouts and a breaker to avoid retry storms.

Stop letting model hiccups domino into customer outages. Build circuit breakers, fallbacks, and guardrails into every AI call—instrumented, observable, and testable.

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The Circuit Breakers Your LLM Stack Should’ve Had Before Last Friday’s Pager Storm

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist