---
title: designer_busy — Cascade designer busy
description: "HTTP 503 designer_busy: The cascade designer is busy right now. Please try again in a moment."
canonical_url: "https://cascades.crscreditapi.com/docs/api/errors/designer_busy"
doc_version: "1.0.0"
last_updated: "2026-10-09T18:04:24Z"
http_status: 503
source: config/api_error_codes.yml
---

# `designer_busy` — Cascade designer busy

**HTTP 503 Service Unavailable**

Message: "The cascade designer is busy right now. Please try again in a moment."

Envelope schema: `ErrorEnvelope` in [openapi.json](https://cascades.crscreditapi.com/openapi.json#/components/schemas/ErrorEnvelope) ([YAML](https://cascades.crscreditapi.com/openapi.yaml)).

## What causes it
- Every concurrent generation slot for the AI designer is in use (shared with the in-app builder). The request was not started.

## How to fix it
1. Retry after a few seconds with backoff; generation requests are not idempotent, so do not queue duplicates.
2. Author the definition directly with `POST /workflows` when you already know the shape you need.

## Operations that return it
- [POST /workflows/generate](/docs/api/workflows/generate-workflow) — Generate a workflow from a prompt

## Example response

```http
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Content-Type: application/json
```

```json
{
  "error": {
    "code": "designer_busy",
    "message": "The cascade designer is busy right now. Please try again in a moment.",
    "details": [],
    "request_id": "6f1c2a3e-8d4b-4c5e-9f0a-1b2c3d4e5f60",
    "doc_url": "https://cascades.crscreditapi.com/docs/api/errors/designer_busy"
  }
}
```

## Related
- [/docs/guides/ai-generate-a-cascade](/docs/guides/ai-generate-a-cascade)

[All error codes](https://cascades.crscreditapi.com/docs/api/errors.md)

## Sitemap

See the full [sitemap](https://cascades.crscreditapi.com/sitemap.md) for all pages.