Lesson 5: Splitting three seconds across every hop
27 min read·
Module 3 · Lesson 5 · About 50 minutes · Needs: Lessons 1 and 2 (requests and tokens), and what a span in a trace is (Module 1). One short streamed call to Groq or Gemini at the end; everything else runs with no key.
The situation
Week 3 at Northdesk. Joel's target says every Ask answer arrives in 3 seconds. Funmi opens simulated trace ask-1073, lesson 2's example: a Marlow County Council employee's question on 29 September, 3,012 tokens in, 516 out. It took 14,117 ms. Joel asks which part to make faster. Helen wants the 3 seconds split across every hop on paper first. This is the latency part of the roadmap's worked estimate.