Agent Rate Limit Strategy

Agent Rate Limit Strategy

Agentforce exposes internal LLM quotas indirectly — you hit them as platform 503s with no forward signal. This skill builds a client-side budget gate in front of the agent: per-user token ledger, CMDT-driven thresholds, and a graceful fallback when the budget is exhausted.

When to Use

Agents exposed to unauthenticated Experience Cloud users, high-traffic Service deflection, or any use case where one user can drive thousands of turns.

Typical trigger phrases that should route to this skill: agent token budget blown, one user drives the whole agent quota, graceful fallback when agent is over limit, rate-limit agentforce per user.

Recommended Workflow

1. Define budget: tokens/user/hour, tokens/tenant/day. Persist in Agent_Rate_Limit__mdt per-persona.
2. In the channel entry point (LWC wrapper or Connect API), call a BudgetService.checkAndConsume(userId, estTokens) before dispatching to the agent.
3. Log consumption via Platform Event Agent_Token_Consumed__e — the subscriber rolls into a User_Token_Ledger__c aggregate.
4. When the budget is exhausted, render the fallback UX (human handoff / retry-after message) instead of calling the agent.
5. Dashboard: p50/p95 consumption per persona, budget exhaustion count, tokens/turn — page SRE when exhaustion >1%.

Key Considerations

• Estimate tokens conservatively from input length (chars/4) before the call; reconcile after.
• Ledger is eventually consistent — use the Platform Event pattern, not synchronous DML.
• Fallback UX must be pre-approved; a generic 'try again later' erodes trust.

Worked Examples (see references/examples.md)

• Budget service sketch — 100 Service reps use agent summarization; one rep loops a bad input 500x.
• Graceful fallback — Budget exhausted mid-conversation.

Common Gotchas (see references/gotchas.md)

• Estimating tokens from chars misses long RAG context — Estimate says 500 tokens; reality is 5000 after grounding.
• Platform Event volume limits — High-traffic agent saturates your 24h PE quota.
• Ledger bucket skew — Timezone boundary resets at midnight UTC, users see it mid-afternoon locally.

Top LLM Anti-Patterns (full list in references/llm-anti-patterns.md)

• Trusting Agentforce to rate-limit for you — it only fails loudly on hard limits.
• Hard-coded tokens/minute without per-persona CMDT — cannot respond to traffic shifts.
• Synchronous ledger DML per turn — blows DML limits.

Official Sources Used

• Agentforce Developer Guide — https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/einstein/genai/guide/agentforce.html
• Einstein Trust Layer — https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.generative_ai_trust_layer.htm
• Invocable Actions (Apex) — https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexref.meta/apexref/apex_classes_invocable_action.htm
• Agentforce Testing Center — https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.agentforce_testing_center.htm