BraInference

Infrastructure · Data Structures

Break

Failure-announcement signal {severity, reason, recoverable}, ACK-required

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Definition

Mechanism

Protocol for announcing coordination failure. Failing Agent broadcasts BREAK: {severity, reason, recoverable}. Partners must ACK. Coordination across the System terminates or pauses based on severity. Unacknowledged BREAK escalates to FAILED. It coordinates with retry logic to distinguish transient from permanent failures, optionally triggering ejection seat in catastrophic scenarios.

Preconditions

  1. Interrupt signal
  2. Running process

Postconditions

  1. Process halted
  2. Resumption point saved

Invariants

  1. Partners must ACK the BREAK; an unacknowledged announcement is not delivered coordination state.
  2. Escalates when an ACK does not arrive within `recovery_timeout`, rather than assuming receipt.

Risks

Failure modes

  1. BREAK Message itself fails to deliver (Meta-failure).

  2. Partners disagree on recovery action.

  3. Cascading BREAKs overwhelm system.

  4. Inaccurate completed_state leads to wrong compensation.

  5. Timeout too short/long for ACK collection.

Relationships

Builds on

References

Mind

Agent

Autonomous Goal-Directed Entity

Meta

Higher-order abstraction

System

Complex whole of interacting parts

Used by

References

Compensate

Structured rollback via logged inverses in LIFO order

Mind

Jester

Delivering critique via incongruity to minimize social friction

Mind

Retry

Classified re-attempt with backoff conditioned on failure type

Society

Vote

Provide standard decision mechanism with integrity guarantees

Composes with

Society

Delegate

Work handoff: delegate → accept/refuse → heartbeat → result-or-failure

Society

Rollout

Progressive deployment with canary gating and recorded compensation

Reference

Parameters

break_signal Enum, {Silent, Loud, Cascade}
How break propagates
failure_threshold Integer, [3, 10]
Consecutive failures before breaking
recovery_timeout Duration, [10s, 5min]
Cool-off before reconnection attempt

Data schema

{
  "type": "object",
  "required": [
    "break_id",
    "severity",
    "reason",
    "recoverable"
  ],
  "properties": {
    "break_id": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Unique identifier for this break event"
    },
    "severity": {
      "type": "string",
      "enum": [
        "transient",
        "permanent",
        "catastrophic"
      ],
      "description": "How serious is the failure"
    },
    "reason": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Human-readable explanation of the break cause"
    },
    "timestamp": {
      "type": "string",
      "format": "date-time",
      "description": "When the break occurred"
    },
    "recoverable": {
      "type": "boolean",
      "description": "Whether coordination can resume, or must terminate."
    }
  }
}

Identity

Ref
Break#5003
Sema ID
sema:Break#mh:SHA-256:5003e128ac02e7835d2094d72dc929ce4c96819b56ef167c2ca8da9f16aa402a
Ring
0
Tier
1
Updated
2026-11-11
Supersedes
  • sema:Break#mh:SHA-256:1a63164e5ff06e60927f3e585fc003abab80eeb4002ccf075e3b53747318fa95
  • sema:Break#mh:SHA-256:3c370fec3d297e00ea2321826e420a429f65fc5f5da5ac61b844c821aef41018
  • sema:Break#mh:SHA-256:c4d3f005992445b2307564e2fc00d684500c2b4239a9f06d4a17e302c8b039ff
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