Rate Limit

Sooner or later your AI comes back with 429 Too Many Requests, and it feels like you broke something expensive. You didn't. You just knocked too fast.

Remember the drive-thru window, the API your AI orders from? A rate limit is the window leaning out and saying: "One order every few seconds, pal. You're holding up the line."

The Costco sample counter. The person handing out samples will absolutely give you one. Come back a bit later, they'll hand you another. But try to grab a fistful all at once and they cut you off: "one per customer, come back in a minute." It's not personal. The tray has to serve everyone walking by, so nobody gets to empty it.

That's a rate limit: a cap on how many requests you can fire at a service inside a given window of time. Every API has one. It's how an app stops a single over-eager user, or a single runaway script, from hogging the whole kitchen and starving everybody else.

Why agents trip it constantly. A human clicks a few times a minute. An agent in a loop can fire off hundreds of requests in a few seconds without blinking. Pull every order, then every customer, then every product, faster than any person could. The window throws up a hand, and 429 is the standard, polite code for "slow down." It is not a flaw in your logic. It's a speed limit you hit because you're moving fast.

The fix is almost always patience, in one of two flavors:

1. Back off and retry. Wait a beat, then ask again. Good tools do this for you automatically, so the agent pauses and resumes and you barely notice it happened.

2. Batch smarter. Ask for 100 things in one order instead of placing 100 separate orders. One trip to the window beats a hundred.

One more angle, because it touches the bill. Rate limits usually scale with your plan. The free tier is a tiny sample tray. Paid tiers get a bigger one. So sometimes "we hit our rate limit" doesn't mean a bug at all. It means you outgrew your plan, and the fix is a checkbox, not code.

A 429 isn't a bug. It's the counter telling you: one sample at a time.