A protective layer for AI agents that prevents 429 rate limit loops and optimizes token usage during API failures.
Install & Download
1. ClawHub CLI
The fastest way to install a skill directly from the registry.
npx clawhub@latest install rate-limit-guard
2. Manual Installation
Copy the skill folder to one of these locations
~/.openclaw/skills/ <project>/skills/ Priority: Workspace > Local > Bundled
3. Prompt Installation
Copy this prompt to OpenClaw to install it automatically.
Help me install rate-limit-guard using Clawhub. If Clawhub is not installed, install it first (npm i -g clawhub).
Prefer to download?
Get the raw skill files in a ZIP archive.
What is Rate Limit Guard?
Rate Limit Guard is a specialized utility designed to manage the stability of AI agents when interacting with high-cost LLM providers. It serves as both a preflight validation tool and an emergency recovery mechanism. By integrating this into your Openclaw Skills collection, you can prevent agents from entering expensive and futile retry loops that often occur when hitting API rate limits.
The skill focuses on preserving your token budget and maintaining agent reliability. It intelligently monitors provider status, manages concurrency, and automatically adjusts request payloads to ensure that even during heavy load or rate limiting, your workflows continue with minimal friction.
Rate Limit Guard Use Cases
- Preventing expensive 429 retry loops during high-concurrency background tasks.
- Automatically shrinking context windows when API limits are reached to ensure request success.
- Managing premium model fallbacks to avoid spamming high-cost providers during outages.
- Batching large-scale data processing into optimized 10-20 item chunks.
How Rate Limit Guard Works
- The skill performs a preflight check analyzing provider status, model requirements, and current concurrency.
- Upon encountering a 429 error, it immediately throttles concurrency to 1 and halts all parallel retry attempts.
- It initiates a context-shrinking routine to prepare a minimal payload for testing.
- A single minimal probe request is dispatched to check for provider recovery.
- It applies an exponential backoff strategy, increasing wait times until the provider resumes normal operations.
Rate Limit Guard Setup
To integrate this skill into your environment, use the standard CLI installer for Openclaw Skills:
# Install the rate-limit-guard skill
openclaw install rate-limit-guard
# Configure default backoff settings
export GUARD_MAX_RETRIES=5
export GUARD_BATCH_SIZE=20
Rate Limit Guard Data Schema & Taxonomy
The skill maintains a stateful log of provider health and request metadata to guide its logic:
| Attribute | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
concurrency_limit |
Integer | The active number of parallel requests allowed. |
recovery_mode |
Boolean | Flag indicating if the system is currently in backoff. |
context_shrink_factor |
Float | The percentage by which the context is reduced during 429 events. |
provider_health |
Object | A map of model providers and their recent failure rates. |
Rate Limit Guard Advanced Features
- Intelligent context window management to shrink payloads dynamically.
- Automated batching logic specifically designed for corpus processing in small chunks.
- Multi-provider awareness to prevent fallback-spam on premium LLM endpoints.
- Real-time action reporting providing clear directives: proceed, recovery mode, or pause.
SKILL.md
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