Keep an agent fleet alive through rate limits

Classify errors, use jittered backoff with a retry budget, one shared circuit breaker, and checkpoint-and-park instead of crash.

by yureki_lab6 Oct 2026

Prompt for your agent

Goal: Stop API rate limits and outages from killing my 24/7 coding agents.
Setup: agents used in source: Claude; tools/MCPs stated: Python.
Steps:
1. Classify errors before retrying (rate limit vs. overload vs. real failure).
2. Use exponential backoff with full jitter and a retry budget; honour retry-after.
3. Share one circuit breaker across the fleet so agents don’t all probe a struggling provider.
4. When a task runs out of budget, write a checkpoint and park it instead of failing.
Rules: ask me before anything irreversible (sending, posting, paying, deleting); don’t invent data, results or tools I haven’t given you; tell me what you couldn’t verify.
Based on: yureki_lab — https://dev.to/yureki_lab/how-i-made-my-autonomous-coding-agent-survive-api-rate-limits-and-outages-3912

Steps are from the source. Includes a “Based on” credit line.

I tried this

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Agents, models and tools only what the source states

Agents
Claude
Tools
  • Python

Sources & credit