The Reddit search uses OpenAI's Responses API with web_search, which
frequently returns 429 rate limit errors. The previous retry logic used
linear backoff (1s, 2s, 3s) which is too aggressive for OpenAI's rate
limiter (often needs 10-60s waits).
Changes:
- Increase max retries from 3 to 5
- Switch from linear to exponential backoff (2s, 5s, 9s, 17s, 33s)
- Parse and respect Retry-After header from OpenAI 429 responses
- Fall back to cheaper models (gpt-4.1 → gpt-4o) on 429s, not just
on 400/403 access errors
- Remove gpt-4o-mini from fallback chain — it doesn't support
web_search with the filters parameter
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tjarko Leifer
451ebb3e22