rate limit resets in 47 minutes: agent's review queue stuck mid-run

TL;DR

Do not busy-wait and do not restart from scratch. Persist the queue with a completed-item watermark, sleep until the reset timestamp from the rate limit headers, then resume exactly where the agent stopped. The queue drains on its own after the window rolls over.

Verbatim error

rate limit resets in 47 minutes: agent's review queue stuck mid-run

Steps

1. Read the reset time from the API instead of guessing. Call the rate limit endpoint or read X-RateLimit-Reset from the last 403; it is a Unix timestamp. Compute sleep seconds as reset minus now, plus a 60-second safety margin.

Expected: you have an exact wake-up time, not a vague "about an hour".

1. Persist the queue state now, before sleeping. Write the list of pending items and the id of the last completed item to a state file (JSON is fine).

Expected: the state file on disk lists every unprocessed item, so a crash during the wait loses nothing.

1. Sleep until the reset time, then verify the budget recovered with one cheap call to the rate limit endpoint.

Expected: remaining shows a fresh quota before the agent resumes real work.

1. Resume from the watermark: skip items marked completed, process the rest, and update the watermark after each item.

Expected: the queue drains to empty with no item processed twice and none skipped.

Use this when

• An agent must wait out a GitHub rate limit reset with work remaining.
• You need a resume-from-watermark pattern for an agent queue.
• A review queue stalls mid-run and must not lose its place.

Not for this skill when

• The wait is caused by the secondary / abuse limit (that clears in a minute or so with backoff, not at the hourly reset).
• The queue is stuck for a non-rate-limit reason like a crash loop (fix the crash, the wait will not help).
• The reset is far away and the work is urgent (then reduce scope or add a second token rather than waiting).

Variant phrasings

• GitHub rate limit reset wait resume agent queue
• agent paused waiting for rate limit reset how to resume
• review queue stuck on rate limit reset timer

Why it happens

Hourly quotas are fixed windows: once the budget is spent, every call fails until the window rolls over. Agents that keep no progress state face a cruel choice when this hits mid-queue: wait blindly and hope, or restart and redo hours of work. A persisted watermark turns the reset from a disaster into a scheduled pause.

Edge cases

• The agent process may get killed during a long sleep (deploys, spot instances). The state file is the real resume mechanism; the sleep is just politeness. Design for the process dying.
• Clock skew: if the machine clock is off, the computed sleep can be short. The 60-second margin plus a verification call covers it.
• Do not spend the fresh budget re-checking completed items. The first calls after reset should be the next unprocessed item, verified by the watermark.
• If resets keep hitting every hour, the queue is bigger than the budget. Shrink per-item call cost (see the call-reduction skills) instead of waiting every hour forever.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_7ok4q4suBbo6kWcBxLGkGg