Is there any way to get sample records while using airbyte ? Say just getting 10 record per stream each before full load

Not really, but you can do this in the Connector Builder UI when building/testing by just setting the preview limit

I also ran into this issue while debugging some (very good) apis 😅 what I did is point it to a nginx proxy that logged the request body/url and just send request to the upstream can send you the proxy config if needed