Overview
This is a brief research note about investigating a PC Gamer article that suffered from extreme web bloat, reaching 37MB in size with hundreds of additional MBs from auto-playing video ads. Simon Willison used Claude and his Rodney tool to analyze the performance issues.
The Breakdown
- A PC Gamer article about RSS readers reached 37MB in size - demonstrating severe web performance problems
- Auto-playing video advertisements added hundreds of additional megabytes of data transfer beyond the base article
- The investigation used Claude Code with the Rodney tool to programmatically analyze the page's bloat issues
- This represents an extreme example of modern web performance anti-patterns where content delivery becomes massively inefficient