Your retry logic has never seen a real 429. Here is how to test it with a local

<p>The database blipped for four seconds. The incident lasted forty minutes.</p> <p>Nothing in the timeline explains the gap except the retry code your own clients are

<p>LLM APIs fail. Rate limits hit at inconvenient times, 503s appear during high-traffic periods, and timeouts spike when the model is under load. If your pipeline doesn't have a

<p>For a while, my LLM provider migration test was embarrassingly simple:</p> <ol> <li>Change the base URL</li> <li>Send one normal prompt</li> <li>Get a response</li> <li>Call it

<h2> TL:DR: </h2> <p>Testing rate-limited APIs without breaking your workflows comes down to one core principle: never test API rate limits against live systems when a mock will

<h2> The retry trap </h2> <p>A free model CI job fails on a timeout.</p> <p>You click retry.</p> <p>The whole pipeline starts over: checkout, build, dependencies, model call.</p>