Developer builds BandwidthGuard to catch bloated API payloads AI agents generate

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A developer noticed that AI coding assistants like Cursor and Claude were generating API endpoints that returned far more data than frontend clients actually needed. Despite responses appearing small after Gzip compression, the underlying JSON payloads contained unused fields, repeated objects, and unnecessary whitespace — with one sample scoring only 52/100 and carrying roughly 54% optional bytes. To address this, the developer built BandwidthGuard, a free browser-based tool that analyzes JSON payloads, HAR files, or cURL output without uploading any data. The tool scores payload efficiency, breaks down fields by necessity, compares compression formats, and categorizes suggested fixes as either safe or contract-changing. It also provides ready-made prompts for popular AI coding tools so developers can ask the same agent that wrote the endpoint to review and slim its own output.

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