Show HN: BreakerMachines – Modern Circuit Breaker for Rails with Async Support

I’m usually weary of long readmes with too much styling as that indicates to me a high likelihood that they were written by ai and the author might not have even read all of it. The use of generic ai images also gives a bad impression - for example, there’s an image captioned “The green lines? Those are your CPU cycles escaping.” without anything green pictured.

I’m not saying your gem is bad. It’s nice to se an attempt at a circuit breaker that is based on the state machines gem, I will certainly look into the actual code if I have a need for it in the future.

Just wanted to give you this bit of feedback about maybe cutting down on length and loosing the ai images in the readme as I think it might be a turnoff for others as well.

Hey HN! I extracted BreakerMachines from my apps after seeing people dealing with cascading failures in production Rails apps.

Key features that set it apart:

- True async/fiber support (works with Falcon, async gems)

- Built-in fallback mechanism with chaining

- Thread-safe without dangerous Timeout.timeout

- Memory-efficient with WeakRef tracking

- Rich introspection and monitoring hooks

- Clean DSL that works with inheritance

With everyone adding AI/LLM APIs to their apps, circuit breakers are more critical than ever.

These APIs can be slow, flaky, or have outages - without protection, your app goes down with them.

The README shows patterns for graceful degradation when a service is down.

I explicitly avoided shipping Redis/DB adapters to keep it focused, the README shows how to implement your own in ~20 lines.

Would love feedback on the API design and any edge cases I might have missed!

I'm still going to add the parallel feature, i removed it because i need to test it in CI.