How to Build AI Agents That Fail Safely: Circuit Breakers, Health Checks, and Graceful Degradation

After running 35+ AI agents in production for months, I have learned that reliability is not about preventing failures—it is about containing them. Here is the infrastructure layer most people skip. The Problem Most AI agents are built for demos. They work beautifully in controlled environments. Then they hit production and everything falls apart. Your model goes down. Your agent hangs. Your memory expires. And suddenly that "autonomous" system needs a human to manually restart it. I learned thi