Plugin Type

VSCode Extension

Cline Version

latest (static analysis finding — not version-specific)

What happened?

src/core/api/retry.ts reads retry-after correctly for delay calculation, but all 429s enter the same retry path regardless of what the retry-after value signals.

A retry-after of 30 seconds means transient pressure — retry makes sense.

A retry-after of 3+ hours means quota exhaustion — retrying wastes the attempt budget and delays surfacing the real error to the user.

Current behavior: retry-after sets the delay but never prevents retry. A quota exhaustion 429 will wait 3 hours, retry, hit the same wall, wait 3 hours again, then fail on attempt 3.

Expected behavior: retry-after above a threshold should surface immediately as a hard stop, not consume retry attempts.

Suggested fix:

const STOP_THRESHOLD_MS = 5 * 60 * 1000 // 5 minutes

if (delay > STOP_THRESHOLD_MS) {
throw error // quota exhaustion — don't retry
}

Documented across production systems:
github.com/SirBrenton/pitstop-truth

Steps to reproduce

1. Configure any provider with a quota-based rate limit (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini)
2. Exhaust the quota — trigger a 429 with a long retry-after (e.g., retry-after: 11180000 for ~3 hours)
3. Observe that withRetry() honors the delay but still retries up to maxRetries times
4. Each retry hits the same quota exhaustion and waits the full delay again before the error surfaces

Provider/Model

1. Configure any provider with a quota-based rate limit (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini) 2. Exhaust the quota — trigger a 429 with a long retry-after (e.g., retry-after: 11180000 for ~3 hours) 3. Observe that withRetry() honors the delay but still retries up to maxRetries times 4. Each retry hits the same quota exhaustion and waits the full delay again before the error surfaces

System Information

Any provider returning 429 with retry-after > 300 seconds
(confirmed: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6, openai)