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Why Do Agents Auto-retry Standard Rate Limits?

Zeno Rocha says agents know how to auto-retry when a service follows the rate-limiting RFC. A proprietary header can report that a caller has used six of 10 requests. Many good services might use a language they invented for themselves. The RFC defines three headers: one for the count, one for the unit of time, and one for when to try again. Follow the RFC and agents know how to auto-retry.

The basics he went back to are the command line, the OAuth layer, the right headers, and the right verbs, and they matter more than ever. When someone builds a proprietary thing because they believe they have a better opinion than others, the agent will know what to do.

A YAML OpenAPI spec was already available. Two of the agent experience core services he checks still said no OpenAPI spec was there, because they search for the .json version, not the .yaml version. He has to build a converter from YAML to JSON and deploy it in the right place so the spec is discoverable. The primitives are the only thing that matters.

Grokipedia·OAuth

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Building what's next (Interview) ·

The Changelog: Software Dev & Open Source

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  1. How Did Resend Take Its First Payments?Zeno Rocha took Resend's first payments with a Stripe payment link in January 2023.
  2. Why Not Let OpenClaw Write the Email Tool?Zeno Rocha refused to let OpenClaw write the email command line because giving it an open API spec would generate a badly written command line, and he hated…
  3. How Can a Mail Record Silently Stop Company Email?Zeno Rocha says receiving email is tricky because an MX record can compete with Google Workspace on priority. Setup starts by adding an MX record.
  4. What Email Feature Was Requested Most for a Year?Zeno Rocha built the first version of inbound email by feeling the pain himself, after it stayed the number one most requested feature for over a year.
  5. How Does TripSee Capture a Booking Email?Zeno Rocha says one company they help, TripSee, lets a user forward a flight or hotel booking email to a special address.
  6. What Kind of Company Is Resend?Zeno Rocha says Resend is a utility company. The team started out thinking they were building a developer tools company.
  7. Why Won't Resend Outsource Its Keys?Zeno Rocha considered WorkOS and skipped it because the team has to own that part.
  8. How Does Zeno Rocha Hire for Email?Zeno Rocha is hiring through heavy noise from fake resumes and other weird things, trying to assemble the Avengers of the email industry.

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