Copilot agent triggers extreme rate limits due to uncontrolled background requests

[Heshamtr]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

JetBrains & Xcode

Body

I'm using GitHub Copilot inside JetBrains IDEs (PyCharm and PhpStorm).

The Copilot agent appears to send autonomous background requests (context gathering, retries, indexing, etc.) without clear visibility or rate limiting on the client side.

This resulted in my account being rate-limited with a cooldown of over 200,000 seconds (~55 hours), even though I was not actively sending requests at a high rate.

Issues:

• No visibility into request volume
• No way to limit or throttle agent behavior
• No warning before hitting hard limits
• Penalty duration is extremely excessive

This makes the agent feature unsafe to use in real projects.

Request:

• Add client-side rate limiting or request caps
• Provide request usage visibility
• Reduce penalty duration or provide recovery mechanism

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