mcp-circuit-breaker — MCP Tool Failure Guard

MCP tools can fail silently or return partial results, leading to cascading retry loops that waste tokens and degrade session quality. This skill detects failure patterns, trips a circuit breaker to halt retries, proposes alternatives, and resets when the tool recovers.

Scope distinction

• Claude Code native retry: low-level transport retries (transparent, fast)
• mcp-circuit-breaker: session-level guard — detects repeated semantic failures, intervenes before token waste compounds

Triggers

• /mcp-circuit-breaker
• "MCP failing", "MCP keeps erroring", "tool isn't working", "circuit-breaker"
• "same error keeps happening", "tool call looping", "MCP timeout"
• Automatic: when the same MCP tool name appears in 3+ consecutive failed calls within a session