I Reverse-Engineered Why LLM Caching Fails in Cloudflare- Then Built the Fix on Cloudflare

Cloudflare AI Gateway is excellent at what it does. But it has one fundamental limitation that quietly costs teams building on LLMs thousands of dollars every month. I reverse-engineered exactly why, and then built the solution entirely on Cloudflare's own platform. This is that story. Cloudflare AI Gateway Is Good. But There Is a Gap. If you're routing LLM traffic through Cloudflare AI Gateway, you're already ahead. You get caching, rate limiting, retries, analytics, provider fallback, and a universal endpoint for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and more, all from one proxy. But there is a gap, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. By default, Cloudflare AI Gateway caches on exact request matches. Cloudflare does provide a cf-aig-cache-key header that lets callers override the cache key. That helps if you know exactly which fields to exclude and your app consistently excludes them. But it still requires your application to pre-solve the problem, to know in advance which fields are noise