Hi everyone! 👋

I've been using OpenClaude recently and absolutely love the project. However, like many others using restricted-tier APIs, evaluation accounts, or local endpoints (such as the NVIDIA NIM trial tier limited to 40 RPM, Groq, or OpenRouter free tiers), I ran into a major bottleneck: frequent 429 Too Many Requests cascades.

🔍 The Problem

Currently, OpenClaude has no client-side rate limiting or request scheduling. When multiple subagents or tools run in parallel, they dispatch a sudden burst of HTTP requests. For limited-tier users:

1. The external API immediately rejects the burst with a 429 error.
2. OpenClaude's retry mechanism kicks in and resends requests rapidly, amplifies the thundering herd problem, and thrashes prompt cache.
3. This makes the tool almost unusable for anyone without high-tier, pay-as-you-go enterprise keys.

💡 The Proposal: Client-Side Token Bucket Traffic Shaper

To make OpenClaude accessible to developers on limited/free tiers, I propose adding a client-side Token Bucket Traffic Shaper with a bounded FIFO Request Queue.

Here is how the architecture looks: