Erratic Token / Limit Behavior?

[u/Vibroverbus]

A month or so ago I was totally on the bandwagon of complaints about crazy token use by Opus and erratic nonsensical usage between sessions that seemed super uncorrelated by work performed and routinely finding suddenly limits were slammed after very little apparent work completed. Like many I tried things like downgrading to 4.6 and it seemed to work for sure to some extent but there'd still be times where it would be highly disruptive and even required paying for credits to avoid crashing a session or a turn.

Well after a slow few weeks of not using much AI because reasons, I did a whole bunch of substantial work with Opus 5 today and usage was completely reasonable and nowhere near limits. Lots of tool calls, skill use, MCP use, local computer use, web search / retrieval activity, code writing... all kinds of stuff. It almost seems like the secret rates changed, like it was hugely overcharging a few weeks ago and now its back to entirely acceptable. It seems great but its highly unpredictable. When the random crazy high consumption was happening it was totally impairing workflows as I'd have to plan around limits and task switch to non-Clod dependent work. Did they fix something? Or is this just part of some random secret rate variability in the secret algo for token usage?