The Problem
I run an automated content pipeline (blog + YouTube Shorts) on a Mac mini with 48GB of unified memory. For months, my cloud LLM API (GLM) free tier handled everything comfortably at 60 RPM. Then, late last year, they quietly dropped the limit to 5–10 RPM overnight. My TTS pronunciation-QA batch script (qa_shorts.zsh + pron_map.py) started validating dozens of Shorts scripts and immediately hit the wall. The pipeline stalled for hours, waiting on retries while I watched tokens burn through my quota.
Attempts & Failures
The obvious fixes were throttling and retrying, but 5–10 RPM is brutal for bursty workloads. Backoff delays turned a short batch job into an hours-long crawl, and the queue behind it backed up every time. The bottleneck wasn't technical—it was the hard rate cap.
Root Cause
