Enio Aguiar

I ve been testing a safety check for an AI app by running a script of test messages many times against the model. Every run was fine until it wasn t: after a day of repeated runs, calls started failing with 429 errors, and waiting 60 seconds between retries stopped helping.

I assumed the limit was per minute. It wasn t. On the free plan for the model I use, the limits are 30 requests a minute, 1,000 requests a day, 8,000 tokens a minute and 200,000 tokens a day. I believe I hit the daily cap, because the app itself also stopped generating responses at the same time. My tests and the app share one account, so they share one budget.

What I m changing: run tests in small batches, never repeat full runs, and plan a backup provider so a quota problem doesn t become an outage.

How do you keep testing from eating your production quota? Separate accounts, a cheaper model for tests, or something else?

We talk a lot about AI automating work, but setting up AI products still requires a surprising amount of manual effort.

Take an AI customer support agent. You need to connect integrations, configure instructions, define business rules, set permissions, test different scenarios, and keep everything updated.