Account rotation is the core mechanism that makes Power Claude useful: when one account is exhausted or rate-limited, the proxy hands the next request to another account in your pool without your client seeing an error.
The state machine
Every account is in exactly one of four states at any moment:
| State | Meaning | Eligible for traffic? |
|---|---|---|
ready | Verified credentials, no active limit | Yes |
cooldown | Hit 429 recently, waiting for anthropic-ratelimit-unified-5h-reset | No |
seven_day_held | 7-day window exhausted | No (until 7-day reset) |
unauthed | Credentials are invalid or revoked | No |
The proxy reads the rate-limit response headers from every Anthropic API response and updates each account's state. It is not counting requests locally — Anthropic owns the truth about your remaining budget.
How "next account" is chosen
When a request comes in:
- Filter accounts to
ready. - Within that set, prefer the account with the lowest current 5-hour usage (most headroom).
- Tiebreak by
last_used_at(least-recently-used) to spread load. - If no
readyaccounts exist, return a friendly 429 to the client and surface the soonest reset time in the extension's status bar.
Order is not alphabetical, FIFO, or based on insertion order. You can override the algorithm with pc config set rotation.strategy ... — lru (above), random, round_robin, or pinned for testing.
Pre-emptive rotation
If a request would push the active account past its 5-hour budget, the proxy rotates before sending. This avoids the 429 → retry round-trip latency. See Pre-emptive rotation for the math.
What does not happen
- No requests are duplicated across accounts. One request, one account.
- No tokens are shared, mixed, or cross-billed.
- Your client (Claude Code, the CLI, etc.) never sees account identifiers. It talks to
localhost:3456; the proxy makes the upstream call.
Inspecting rotation in real time
pc status --json | jq '{active_account, rotation_count_today, accounts_ready}'The status-bar tooltip in VS Code shows the same data without needing the CLI.