Request entity too large

GitHub issue #8 Feature Proposed jeffallenvia github Dec 21, 2025 View original 1 GitHub reaction

A very long session where I sent Shelley to go research something difficult to find ended with:

LLM request failed: status 413 Request Entity Too Large (url=http://169.254.169.254/gateway/llm/_/gateway/anthropic/v1/messages, model=claude-opus-4-5-20251101): {
  "error": {
    "type": "request_too_large",
    "message": "Request exceeds the maximum size"
  }
}

See: https://lines.exe.xyz:9999/c/swiss-transmission-line-mont-la-ville-vaulion-wind-farm-grid

shelley

1 Comment

josharianvia github Mar 25, 2026

This just showed up again in a private report. They weren't doing anything unusual; the problematic asset was one that Shelley itself came up with.

There are really a few separate issues here:

  • should we check in advance whether an attachment is a reasonable size? and if it's too big, should we feed that info back into shelley so it can work around it?
  • if/when this happens, how does a user recover from it w/o losing their conversation?
  • should we communicate the failure more gracefully, given that it's a known failure mode?