Possible degradation of Genie agentic capabilities in Databricks Free Edition this week?

[PROAC]

Hi Everyone,

Has anyone else noticed a degradation in the capabilities of Genie in the Databricks Free Edition over the past week?

About a week ago, I was successfully using Genie in an agentic way, it was able to generate code, create pipelines, and build objects directly as part of workflows. It behaved much more like an agent capable of executing multi-step tasks.

However, recently when I try similar workflows, it no longer performs those agentic actions. Instead, it seems restricted to behaving like an answer-only chatbot.. generating explanations or code suggestions, but not actually creating or orchestrating objects or pipelines.

I’m trying to determine whether this is a known limitation change or a temporary issue.

Has anyone else experienced this change during the past week?

Thanks in advance.

[Ashwin_DSA · Accepted solution]

Hi @PROAC,

Had a similar question yesterday..

Under normal conditions, there are two kinds of limits:

Per-minute throughput: Genie has soft limits (e.g., ~20 questions/min via UI, ~5/min via API in the free tier). If you briefly exceed those, things usually start working again within a few minutes once traffic drops.

Free Edition daily quota: If you ever fully exhaust the daily compute quota, compute is unavailable for the rest of the day and comes back the next day.

What you’re seeing is a bit different. There is currently a temporary backend restriction on agentic features in Free Edition to tighten abuse protection and manage capacity. That can make Agent Mode disappear or fall back to chat even when notebooks and normal code still work, and it’s not something you can clear by waiting in your own workspace. It will be re-enabled once that remediation work is finished, but there isn’t an exact public ETA we can give you.

If this answer resolves your question, could you mark it as “Accept as Solution”? That helps other users quickly find the correct fix.

[PROAC]

Hey Ashwin,

Thank you so much for your answer. It indeed resolves my question. Have a great day!

Regards,

Andres.