As long as you are using JSON, you will be able to optimize.

Did you know that you can pass numbers up to 2 billion in 4 constant bytes instead of as a string of 20 average dynamic bytes? Also, fun fact, you can cut your packets in half by not repeating the names of your variables in every packet, you can instead use a positional system where cardinality represents the type of the variable.

And you can do all of this with pre AI technology!

Neat trick huh?

I too have used a similar strategy of packing variables together. I even came up with a name for it. I called it a "building."

Like other commenters already said, there are numerous ways they could have avoided/reduced the $500k/yr cost pre LLM, including simply paying someone to do port the code.

So I don't see there is any point in the article.