Rate limit no backoff

Skill viditkbhatnagar/immunize/src/immunize/patterns/rate-limit-no-backoff

A curated pattern library that stops AI coding assistants from repeating common runtime errors. No API key. No LLM calls at runtime.

Install

npx -y skills add viditkbhatnagar/immunize --skill rate-limit-no-backoff

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Use when calling HTTP APIs from Python to retry 429 responses with exponential backoff instead of crashing on the first rate-limit.

SKILL.md

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rate-limit-no-backoff

HTTP APIs return 429 when the caller is rate-limited. Code that ignores the status and calls raise_for_status() immediately crashes the whole script on the first throttle — even though a second attempt a few seconds later would almost always succeed:

requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 429 Client Error: Too Many Requests

Example

Wrong — happy-path only; dies on the first 429:

def fetch_user(client, user_id):
    resp = client.get(f"/users/{user_id}")
    resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.json()

Right — bounded retry with exponential backoff on 429:

import time

def fetch_user(client, user_id, max_attempts=4):
    resp = None
    for attempt in range(max_attempts):
        resp = client.get(f"/users/{user_id}")
        if resp.status_code != 429:
            break
        time.sleep(2 ** attempt)
    resp.raise_for_status()
    return resp.json()

Respect Retry-After when present

If the server returns a Retry-After header (seconds or HTTP date), honor it instead of your own schedule:

wait = int(resp.headers.get("Retry-After", 2 ** attempt))
time.sleep(wait)

Cap total wait

Never let a backoff loop sleep indefinitely. A bounded attempt count (3–5) plus a ceiling on the delay (e.g. 30 s) keeps a slow upstream from freezing the caller's process forever.

Prefer a real HTTP client retry feature

requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter(max_retries=...), urllib3.Retry, and httpx.Client(transport=...) all support retry policies that cover 429 plus 5xx correctly. Reach for those before rolling your own loop — they handle jitter, connection failures, and Retry-After out of the box.