Power Claude reads two rate-limit headers from every Anthropic response: anthropic-ratelimit-unified-5h-reset and anthropic-ratelimit-unified-7d-reset. The proxy uses those timestamps to decide when an account is allowed to receive traffic again. If an account looks "stuck" — exhausted past its reset time — one of three things is happening.
1. Clock skew between the proxy and Anthropic's API
The reset timestamps are absolute UTC. If your machine's clock is off by more than a few seconds, Power Claude may either send requests early (and get re-throttled) or hold them back past the actual reset.
timedatectl status | grep "System clock synchronized"If that reports no, install chrony or ntpsec-ntpdate and let it sync.
2. The 7-day window, not the 5-hour window
Claude's free and Pro plans have two windows: a 5-hour rolling budget and a 7-day rolling budget. The 7-day window is much less visible — it resets at the same wall-clock time you first hit it a week ago, not on a calendar boundary. If an account looks stuck for hours past its 5-hour reset, check the 7-day header:
pc status --account <id> --json | jq '.headers.unified_7d_reset'If the 7-day reset is days away, the account is correctly held back. Rotation will simply skip it until the 7-day timer expires.
3. A stale credential file
If the credential file for an account is older than its last verified token (e.g. you swapped accounts but the file still references the old one), Power Claude can't refresh the reset headers because the API rejects the auth. The account is then frozen at whatever state was last cached.
pc accounts list --json | jq '.[] | {id, last_verified_at, credential_mtime}'If credential_mtime is older than last_verified_at by more than a day, refresh the credentials with pc accounts refresh <id>.
What does NOT cause this
- Restarting the proxy. The reset headers come from Anthropic, not from local state.
- Changing the rotation order. Order only affects which account is tried next, not when a held-back account becomes eligible.
- Toggling Power Mode. Power Mode controls what the proxy does; the limit math doesn't change.
When to file a bug
If clocks are synced, the 7-day window is clear, credentials are fresh, and the account still doesn't recover within an hour of its stated reset time — that's a defect. File via the extension's status-bar Report issue action with the proxy log attached.