You’ve built an agent. It calls external APIs — LLMs, databases, messaging services. Everything works fine in testing.

Then you hit production. The agent needs to respond to 20 requests at once. Your API quota runs out. Requests fail. The agent retries. More failures. More retries. Within seconds, you have a retry storm and your quota is completely exhausted.

This is the rate limit problem.

It’s not just about handling 429 errors. It’s about: