TestCommentIngestion's parent-post index wait ran at the default 250ms poll, whose arithmetic gives an effective ~25s ceiling (100/min global bucket) — far under the 45s contractBudget — and the wait was measured at 23.97s on a QUIET stack. Under full-suite make ci load it crossed the cliff 5 consecutive runs (both branches; predates task 4). At 600ms the whole budget fits inside the bucket, restoring the doc's own invariant that a 429 means the wait was truly hopeless. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>