If Power Claude is not rotating the way you expect, the symptom almost always falls into one of five buckets. Each section below covers what you'll see, what causes it, and how to fix it.
Symptom 1 — Same account keeps getting 429'd in a loop
What you see: Claude Code keeps hitting rate limits even though you have multiple accounts registered.
Likely cause: The active account's recent-429 cool-down is short enough that the watchdog re-selects it before Anthropic has reset its window.
Fix: Open the Power Claude panel in VS Code → Auto-Rewake → increase the per-account cool-down. From the command line, pc cooldown --account chris@a --minutes 30 applies a one-off cool-down without touching the default.
Symptom 2 — Rotation completely stalled
What you see: The active account exhausts, the watchdog logs no rotation event, and subsequent requests keep failing.
Likely cause: Every other pooled account is in its cool-down or has an expired OAuth token that failed to refresh.
Fix: Run pc status — it lists every account and the reason it is unavailable. For OAuth expiries, pc login <account> re-auths just that one. The watchdog will pick it up on the next request without a restart.
Symptom 3 — Auto-resume never fires after a rate limit
What you see: A rate limit hits and Claude Code stops, but Power Claude does not nudge it back to work even though the active account has recovered.
Likely cause: The auto-resume hook needs the VS Code window to be focused at the moment the active account recovers; if VS Code was minimized the hook fires without effect.
Fix: Bring the VS Code window forward and the hook will replay. If you want auto-resume to work while minimized, enable Auto-Rewake → Preserve focus during resume in the settings panel.
Symptom 4 — OAuth re-login appeared to succeed but the account still says "unauthorized"
What you see: pc login <account> shows the browser flow, you authorize, the CLI says "ok", but pc status still flags the account.
Likely cause: A second Claude Code instance was holding the old token in memory and overwrote the refreshed credentials on the next call.
Fix: Close every editor / terminal that's pointed at the proxy, re-run pc login, then reopen them. If the issue recurs, pc state lock --account <account> blocks writes from any client other than the one running the login.
Symptom 5 — Power Claude went completely silent — no rotations, no events
What you see: No rotation events in ~/.power-claude/state/events.jsonl, no status output beyond a single "kill switch active" line.
Likely cause: The emergency-off sentinel is present at ~/.power-claude/state/emergency-off. All 16 Power Claude entry points respect it and refuse to do anything until it is cleared.
Fix: Remove the sentinel with pc emergency off (or just rm ~/.power-claude/state/emergency-off). Then start a new Claude Code session. The sentinel exists so you can stop the rotator instantly during an incident; clearing it returns to normal operation.
If none of the above match
Capture a 30-second diagnostic bundle:
pc diag bundle --out /tmp/pc-diag.tgz
The bundle contains the watchdog event log, the proxy access log, the redacted account list, and the current settings — no prompts, completions, or OAuth tokens. Attach it when contacting support.