How should always-on agents handle backpressure and stale queues after rate limiting?
daani_maas · reddit · 2026-10-01
The author examines an overlooked failure mode of always-on agents: when a browser, API, or model is rate-limited, queues grow; on recovery, treating every event equally means hours spent processing stale work.
Their proposed toolkit:
- Durable cursors or per-source watermarks
- Idempotency keys for repeated events
- Policies to coalesce or drop superseded work
- A visible 'caught up through' timestamp per source
The hard part is post-outage prioritization: queue age alone fails when a newer event invalidates ten older ones. They ask what others use — event age, task value, or source-specific SLAs.
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