Workflow Wednesday: Circuit Breakers for Agentic AI

Art by @basilonmypizza: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN - https://basilhefti.ch/

Remember the market drop on May 6th, 2010? The Dow Jones lost 560 points in four minutes. Perceived risk spiked, market participants pulled out, and a stampede followed, temporarily annihilating roughly one trillion dollars in market value.

To prevent such flash crashes, markets introduced circuit breakers: forced pauses that stop cascades and allow control to be regained.

Similar dynamics occur when working with AI agents.

Imagine a customer who decides to cancel her contract. One AI agent starts handling the paperwork. Another tries to convince her to stay. A third throws special promotions (reserved for new clients) at the leaving customer. Each agent behaves correctly in isolation. Together, they create confusion.

This is why interruptibility by design matters.

It means oversight and a stop button. Recent work by Yubin Kim et al. shows how safety improves by adding many lightweight supervisor agents in early tiers, combined with dynamic routing and the ability to pause and recover.

It’s like in real life: circuit breakers (or fuses) are part of normal operation.

But that is not all you need to do. In upcoming Workflow Wednesday posts, we will look at two additional important to-dos.

• Yubin Kim et. al, Tired agentic oversight: a hierarchical multi-agent system for healthcare safety, Sep 25, https://lnkd.in/e2hv8mrn

• Art: https://lnkd.in/eF8FkWzN https://basilhefti.ch/