It can take a second
There's a lot of infrastructure (database calls, page loads, etc.) that has been optimized for humans and needs to return in, say, 200ms, or 20ms.
I'm often building for agents now, and the latency requirements are different, which often also means you can figure out an architecture that makes things 100x cheaper to run. If the agent is running in the background it’s often ok for something to take a second.
For example (and this is less latency focused but hey), https://clawfeeds.com/ writes markdown files to an S3 bucket, which then is essentially free to serve to agents.
# May 16, 2026