Anecdotally this tracks what I've felt over the past month, though I haven't rigorously quantified it. I've just been burning through my quota considerably more quickly than I was a week ago. Hitting limits I didn't before. I hit my weekly max yesterday, it resets tomorrow so I asked my admin to add $50 to my overage limit so I could bridge the gap. Burned that in an hour, I was astounded. Two weeks ago that much bought me two days of work. I asked for another $10 so I could simply have Claude dump handoff notes that could be picked up by Codex, and got through 4 of the 10 agents I'd had running before running out. When it resets tomorrow I'm setting the default back to 4.7, my strong suspicion is 4.8 was designed to lighten the load by burning more quota (not necessarily tokens) on the backend. I don't understand the mechanism but they're clearly putting the squeeze on power users. Curious what others have experienced.

I'm definitely seeing 4.8 use fewer tokens than 4.7 did to accomplish the same outcomes. And the key is, I think it takes less clock time for me to get the outcomes I want with 4.8 - it's more likely to get things right the first time.

I think this is us humans mis-attributing "it's getting more done" as "it costs more". I think the rate of getting more done scaled quite a bit faster than the token burn.