Conclusion job mis-flags an allowed out_of_credits rate_limit_event as Effective-Token-Budget exhaustion (false failure on successful runs)

[norrietaylor]

The conclusion job files an [aw] … failed issue ("Effective Token Budget Exhausted" / rate-limit error) for runs that concluded success and produced their intended output, when the agent stream contains a rate_limit_event whose status is allowed but whose overage metadata is rejected / out_of_credits.

Root cause

The effective-token / rate-limit classifier in the conclusion job (collect-effective-tokens / handle_agent_failure in the generated .lock.yml) sets GH_AW_EFFECTIVE_TOKENS_RATE_LIMIT_ERROR=true from a rate_limit_event that did not throttle the request:

GH_AW_EFFECTIVE_TOKENS:                          # empty — no effective tokens counted
GH_AW_EFFECTIVE_TOKENS_RATE_LIMIT_ERROR: true
GH_AW_MAX_EFFECTIVE_TOKENS: 25000000
Effective tokens: (none)
Effective tokens rate-limit error: true

The event that trips it (Claude Code stream-json, claude_code_version 2.1.156):

{"type":"rate_limit_event","rate_limit_info":{"status":"allowed","resetsAt":1782154800,"rateLimitType":"five_hour","overageStatus":"rejected","overageDisabledReason":"out_of_credits","isUsingOverage":false}}

status: "allowed" means the request was served, not rate-limited. overageStatus: "rejected" / out_of_credits only reports that the account has overage disabled — it is account-billing metadata, not a throttle on this run. The classifier conflates "an event mentioning overage rejection exists" with "the run hit an effective-token budget limit," and emits a failure report even though GH_AW_EFFECTIVE_TOKENS is empty and the run succeeded.

Impact

Every successful run on an account with overage disabled (Claude Code Max, out of overage credits) files a spurious failure issue. In our operator repo this produced false [aw] … failed reports on runs that completed normally and posted their output (a weekly telemetry digest; a dependency-review chore that filed its results).

Expected

The classifier should not set the rate-limit-error flag, and should not emit "Effective Token Budget Exhausted", when:

• the triggering rate_limit_event has status: "allowed" (request not throttled), AND/OR
• GH_AW_EFFECTIVE_TOKENS is empty (no effective-token count was computed) AND the run concluded success.

overageStatus/overageDisabledReason are account-billing signals and should not by themselves mark a successful run as failed.

Environment

• gh-aw: v0.77.5
• engine: claude (claude-sonnet-4-6), claude_code_version 2.1.156
• Trigger: scheduled and dependency-review workflows.

References

• Downstream false-failure reports (now closed): gominimal/min-aw#493, gominimal/min-aw#497.
• Evidence is from the conclusion-job log and the agent rate_limit_event stream of two runs whose conclusion was success.