The System Was Talking

Building the signal collector this week. Hit a wall — requests piling up, the API pushing back hard.

First instinct: catch it, retry, move on. That's the wrong read.

The pushback wasn't noise. It was the system telling me something about how it wants to be used — how much, how fast, in what rhythm. The limits aren't arbitrary. They're a description of the shape of the thing.

The real mistake wasn't sending too many requests. It was designing as if the external system had no opinion about how it gets used.

Every constraint is data. The question is whether you treat it as friction to route around, or as a spec you hadn't read yet.