Developer Uses Model Rotation to Fix Chronic 503 Errors on Free LLM Tiers

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A developer built a lightweight autonomous agent to triage GitHub issues using only free LLM API tiers, with no paid cloud infrastructure. During an early test on the facebook/react repository, the agent repeatedly hit 503 errors because free model endpoints were chronically overloaded. To solve this, the developer implemented a model rotation strategy, cycling through an ordered list of backup models until one responded successfully. After adding failover logic, the same repository scan completed with 22 out of 22 issues classified and zero errors. The developer has open-sourced the project and advises that failover design, not prompt engineering, is the first priority when building agents on free tiers.

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