Step-by-step answer
Core 60–75 min7 stepsSimulate the three buckets and the cache cliff
A discrete-event simulator of the provider's three per-model token buckets (RPM and ITPM charged at admission, OTPM drained as output streams), three experiments on bursts, the onset of 429s and the cache cliff, and a header parser that shows traffic your own logs can't see. The surprise is that with a one-second burst window, ITPM rejects Poisson clusters well below the OTPM ceiling the arithmetic predicts.
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