When your key stops working
What happens when your Claude key is invalid, out of credit, or rate-limited, and why it isn't treated as a bug.
A key can stop working for reasons that have nothing to do with your code: it was revoked, the account ran out of credit, you hit a rate limit, or the model a stage is set to use isn't available on that key.
What Reqursor Development does
Before a worker claims a ticket, it validates the connection. If that check fails:
- The ticket is not claimed. It stays in Ready, untouched, with a note explaining what went wrong (invalid key, no permission, rate-limited, or unreachable).
- It is not escalated as a code failure. This distinction matters: a key problem doesn't get mixed in with tickets that genuinely need review because the code didn't hold up.
- No budget is spent. A failed key check happens before any model call, so it doesn't count against your per-ticket, per-day or per-month cap.
The same applies mid-run if a key is revoked or runs out of credit partway through. The stage stops rather than continuing on a broken connection.
Fixing it
Update the key in Settings → Claude & models and run Test connection again. Once it passes, Ready tickets (including the one that failed) are picked up normally. Nothing needs to be manually reset or re-queued.