ThinkFacility

Claude Code error messages, explained

Paste the line your terminal printed and find out what it means. The answers come from reading the strings in the shipped binary, because several of these commands are hidden from the command list and missing from the published documentation.

Lower-priority mode isn't available right now.

The offer was never made to your account, so there is nothing to switch on. It does not mean you used up the week's allowance and it does not mean you are in a cool-off, because both of those print a different line.

Claude Code 2.1.269Claude Codeusage limits/low-priority

Repeated 529 Overloaded errors

Anthropic's API is busy across every user and Claude Code has run out of retries. Your key, your plan and your usage limits are all uninvolved.

Claude Code 2.1.269Claude CodeAPI errors529

Why these pages exist

Claude Code prints a lot of one-line refusals that don't say why. Some of them are about your plan, some are about the service being busy, and a couple are about a staged rollout your account isn't part of yet. Telling those apart is the whole job, because the fix is completely different in each case and only one of them is worth sitting and waiting out.

Every page here names the version the strings were read from. Anthropic ships Claude Code most days, and the wording of several of these lines can be changed from the server without a release at all, so treat a mismatch as your copy being newer rather than as our typo.