What do you do when the agent hits its rate limit mid-feature?
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Half a feature in, agent taps out on usage, and now you're staring at code you didn't fully read yourself. Do you wait for the reset, switch to a different model, or just finish it by hand? Curious how people handle getting cut off mid-flow, not at a clean stopping point.
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Just wait and tell it "go on" when limits lifted :)
Also, run ClaudeCode and Codex, both in CLI, in parallel - and integrate them. So ClaudeCode is your main developer, and Codex is external reviever/adviser. They can communicate directly even without plugin, and it saves tons of tokens, aside if other benefits
the real problem in that sentence isnt the rate limit. its 'code you didnt fully read yourself.' the rate limit was probably a gift because it forced you to stop before shipping something you couldnt actually own. my move is: before restarting the agent, read the last diff it produced end to end. if you cant explain each block to a reviewer, delete it and rebuild the feature slower. rate limits are the only mechanism that reliably catches the 'ill just trust it and keep going' pattern. worth using them as the checkpoint instead of routing around them.
I stopped switching models mid-feature after doing it a few times. the second model doesn't know the decisions the first one already made, it just sees the code, so you either get something inconsistent or you spend the reset explaining context you already burned tokens explaining once. these days I use the wait to do the boring stuff, read the diff properly, write the test I was going to skip, or just think about the next step instead of coding blind. the rate limit is annoying but it's rarely the thing that actually cost me time.