How I Tamed AI API Rate Limits with a Simple Queue (opens in new tab)

A few months back, I was building a content generation tool. The idea was simple: take a list of topics, hit the OpenAI API, and get SEO-optimized articles. My prototype worked great with 5 topics. Then I scaled to 50. Then 200. That’s when the 429s started flooding my logs. Rate limited. Overloaded. Blocked. I was frustrated. Not because the API was unstable — it’s actually very reliable — but because I hadn’t thought about the pace of my requests. Every failed call meant lost time, wasted r...