Cloudflare's recent AI-driven rewrite of Next.js in a week, costing just $1,100 in tokens, inspired Reco to tackle their own expensive JSON transformation bottleneck. Reco's solution, gnata, is a pure-Go implementation of JSONata 2.x that replaced their legacy jsonata-js RPC service. This change eliminated a $25,000 monthly compute bill, saving $500,000 annually and resolving Kubernetes scaling issues.

The key innovation was a two-tier evaluation system: a fast path for simple field lookups and a full parser for complex expressions, enabling a 1,000x speedup on common operations while running entirely within Go services.