Programming Tutorials

  You deploy a new GenAI feature powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet. It passes unit tests, works flawlessly in staging, and performs well during the initial rollout. Then, peak traffic hits. Suddenly, your logs are flooded with  429 Too Many Requests . Your application logic, expecting a JSON response, chokes on the error. Latency spikes, and user requests start failing in a cascade. The default SDK retry logic—if enabled—isn't aggressive or smart enough to handle the burst. This is the reality of building on top of LLM APIs. Rate limiting isn't an error; it's a traffic control signal. To build production-grade applications with Node.js or Python, you cannot rely on happy-path coding. You must implement robust  Exponential Backoff with Jitter . Understanding the Root Cause: Why 429s Happen Before patching the code, we must understand the mechanics of the failure. The Claude API, like most managed services, uses the Token Bucket algorithm or Leaky Bucket algorithm to govern usag...