Stripping max_tokens on a 402 made things worse (the precheck then prices the model's own 65k maximum). Instead: parse the 'can only afford N' budget from the error and retry once clamped to N when N >= 256 — small answers survive a thin balance; anything less surfaces the 402 verbatim, because the real fix is funding the account the key belongs to. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>