Bug: Claude Limit Reached Despite Budget Remaining — Falls Back to GPT-4.1

It sounds incredibly frustrating to have access to a powerful model like Claude, have a budget for it, and still be reverted to a standard model. This is a common point of confusion, and it's likely related to rate limits, not an issue with your spending budget.

Here’s a breakdown of what's happening and how you can manage it.

Budget vs. Rate Limit: The Key Difference

This is the core of the issue. You are running into a rate limit, not a budget limit.

Your Spending Budget ($10): This is a financial safety net you set. It tells GitHub, "Do not charge me more than this amount." It does not grant you unlimited requests.

GitHub's Rate Limit: This is a usage policy to ensure system stability and prevent abuse. GitHub limits the number of requests you can make to its most powerful models within a certain time frame (e.g., per minute or per hour).

When you make many complex requests in a short period, you hit this rate limit. As a protective measure, GitHub temporarily downgrades you to a standard model (like GPT-3.5/GPT-4) until the limit resets. This happens regardless of how much money is left in your budget.

What You Can Do About It

While you can't turn off the rate limits, you can adjust your workflow to avoid hitting them as often:

Pace Your Requests: The most effective solution is to be more deliberate with your prompts. If you send many requests back-to-back, you are more likely to be rate-limited.

Pause When You See the Warning: When you get the "exceeded limit" warning, stop and wait for 5-10 minutes. This usually gives the system enough time to reset your limit, and your next request should go back to using the premium model.

Combine Your Prompts: Instead of asking several small follow-up questions, try to formulate a single, more comprehensive prompt that includes all the context and instructions at once.

Use Chat for Iteration: For iterative tasks (e.g., "now change this part," "now add a comment here"), the Copilot Chat interface is often better than repeatedly regenerating code blocks.

Is It a Bug?
While annoying, this is likely the intended behavior of the rate-limiting system designed to ensure fair usage for all users. However, if you feel the limits are far too restrictive (e.g., it happens after only one or two simple requests), it could be worth reporting to GitHub Support, as they may be able to provide more specific insight into your account's usage patterns.

Rate limiting should not cause copilot to automatically switch to a standard model and run the task that the user had asked the premium model complete. The user should be asked if that's what they want to do first.

Gpt(Standard) actioning a prompt designed for Claude(Premium) can cause considerable damage to the project code, with gpt being unable to undo its own changes without causing further problems. Having fallen over this problem a few times and lost work, I have had to start backing up my project to github before asking most prompts in copilot. This is a poor workflow and very frustrating.