An API client generator for sites that forgot to publish one

What it does

Reverse API Engineer is a CLI tool that watches how a website talks to its backend, then generates a clean, typed API client in Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript. You point it at a URL and describe what you want—say, all Apple job listings—and it opens a browser to record the live network traffic. Claude then reads the captured HAR file and writes a working client that mirrors the site’s real, undocumented endpoints.

The interesting bit

The tool treats reverse engineering as a conversation rather than a chore. You can drive the browser yourself, hand the wheel to an autonomous agent via Playwright or Chrome MCP, or re-run generation against a past capture without browsing again. It is mostly glue between a headless browser, a traffic dump, and an LLM, but that glue removes the usual ritual of manually extracting cURL commands from DevTools.

Key highlights

• Generates typed clients in Python, JavaScript, or TypeScript from captured HAR traffic
• Supports manual browsing, autonomous agent navigation, or re-running past captures
• Can drive Playwright, a real Chrome instance via MCP, or the Vercel agent-browser CLI
• Includes a dedicated collector mode for structured data extraction to JSON or CSV
• Offers scriptable JSON output for integration into larger pipelines

Caveats

• Generated code runs locally via Claude Code, so reviewing it before execution is wise
• Sites with aggressive bot detection may block automated capture and force manual interaction

Verdict

Worth a look if you regularly integrate with sites that serve JSON but offer no official API. Skip it if you are only scraping static HTML or already have well-documented specs to work from.