The problem: your agent is polling itself into a rate limit ban
If you're building an autonomous agent that needs to know "did anything change yet," the default instinct is to ask, over and over: GET /status, sleep, GET /status, sleep. It's the simplest thing that works — until it doesn't. You tighten the poll interval to catch events faster, and the API you're hitting notices. You get a 429. You back off. You miss the event you were polling for because your backoff window happened to land on top of it. This is the polling API rate limit agent workaround problem, and almost every agent framework hits it in production within the first few weeks.
It's not a bug in your code. It's a structural mismatch: polling asks "did anything happen?" on a fixed clock, while the events you care about happen on their own clock. No poll interval is ever exactly right — too slow and you're late, too fast and you get throttled.
This post covers why the usual workarounds are patches, not fixes, and what the actual structural alternative looks like — for agents specifically, where the caller is often headless, long-running, and can't just refresh a browser tab.
Why the common workarounds don't hold up
