I literally only make it halfway through the week until my weekly usage runs out. This is using only Opus, no fable, and I'm on the max x20 plan. It's become ridiculous.

I am on the Claude Max 20x plan, and this still happens when using Fable 5/Opus 5. I would run out of weekly quota in 2 days, whereas Opus 4.8 would last the entire week, and sit at about 80-90% at the end.

Agreed. The area I think will become more prevalent in the future for organizations are cost per intelligence -- effectively efficiency. An unoptimized model that costs 90x more than another that is only 10-15% less intelligent is something I would say is not a good deal.

GLM 5.3-flash fits the bill

I'm with you, for what I usually do most models are already more than enough.

What I'm really keen on is better auto-reasoning so I don't have to constantly have the constant inner debate on which reasoning effort to pick for each task.

I seriously hate the none-low-medium-high-xhigh-max-ultra etc that we have now, with companies frequently recommending different ones on each new model release, etc.

It's apparently called Adaptive Test-Time Compute or Dynamic Test-Time Compute and companies are apparently working on it (according to some LLM :shrug:)

Have you tried Grok 4.6, if you're focused on token budgets? In a league of it's own for tokens/intelligence.

Try gpt 5.6 Luna max