"Latency budgets for LLM features: what users will actually wait for"
An LLM feature that takes eight seconds might be fine in one place and fatal in another — and most teams find out which after the feature is built. How to set a latency budget before writing code, and where users will genuinely wait.
Eight seconds is a long time. It does not feel like it when you are testing a feature yourself, because you built it and you are curious about the output. But a user who clicked a button and got a spinner has none of your patience. Whether eight seconds is acceptable depends entirely on where those seconds sit, and most teams discover the answer after the feature is built, when moving the architecture around is expensive.
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