Scarcity States

Every AI product is a thin UI over a finite datacenter, and sometimes the datacenter loses. The pattern: name the limit, show the wait, offer the fallback. DeepSeek’s overloaded January 2025 made “server busy, try again later” arguably the most-seen AI error message in history — and proved users forgive scarcity far more readily than they forgive vagueness.

Why it works. A named limit with a reset time preserves agency; a spinner that dies preserves nothing.

Steal: state when to come back, not just that it’s busy. Skip: disguising capacity limits as generic errors — users learn the truth from Reddit anyway, and then they relabel your honesty too.

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