Retry-After is not decoration; it is a negotiation between your script and a tired upstream service. API Scripting Studio participants often treat retries as math puzzles, yet the header text frequently encodes politeness windows that change by route.
We coach learners to log the header verbatim before sleeping. That single habit prevented an entire cohort from stampeding a partner sandbox during a shared exam window. The partner team sent muffins; we will take it.
When headers go missing, escalate to humans. Scripts should pause and notify instead of guessing. Your future self inherits fewer angry threads, and mentors spend office hours on interesting problems instead of firefighting.