shift-ai Preflight

Inspect and optimize base64-encoded images in AI API request payloads before sending. Helps prevent oversized-image failures and can reduce multimodal token usage.

When to use this skill

Use this skill when you are:

• Building a JSON request payload that contains inline base64-encoded images for OpenAI or Anthropic
• Sending image-heavy payloads to api.openai.com or api.anthropic.com
• Reviewing code that constructs multimodal API requests with user-supplied images
• Troubleshooting 400 errors related to oversized images, invalid image payloads, or unsupported formats

Do not use this skill when:

• The payload contains only text
• Images are referenced only by URL
• The payload has already been optimized by shift-ai
• You need exact preservation of original image bytes

Prerequisites