I thought prompt tweaks would fix my slow agent, but the real win was chasing cold starts first

Description and use

<p>I spent way too long trimming prompts for a workflow that felt slow.</p> <p>Not expensive. Not inaccurate.</p> <p>Slow.</p> <p>And not even in the obvious way.</p> <p>Users kept saying some version of:</p> <blockquote> <p>It feels slow before it even starts thinking.</p> </blockquote> <p>That line turned out to be the clue.</p> <p>I was blaming GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.6 for latency that was happening before either model saw a single token.</p> <p>Once I traced the full request path, the biggest speed wins came from fixing cold starts, queue handoffs, and webhook behavior — not from shaving

Problem

<p>I spent way too long trimming prompts for a workflow that felt slow.</p> <p>Not expensive. Not inaccurate.</p> <p>Slow.</p> <p>And not even in the obvious way.</p> <p>Users kept saying some version of:</p> <blockquote> <p>It feels slow before it even starts thinking.</p> </blockquote> <p>That line turned out to be the clue.</p> <p>I was blaming GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.6 for latency that was happening before either model saw a single token.</p> <p>Once I traced the full request path, the biggest speed wins came from fixing cold starts, queue handoffs, and webhook behavior — not from shaving

Outcome

<p>I spent way too long trimming prompts for a workflow that felt slow.</p> <p>Not expensive. Not inaccurate.</p> <p>Slow.</p> <p>And not even in the obvious way.</p> <p>Users kept saying some version of:</p> <blockquote> <p>It feels slow before it even starts thinking.</p> </blockquote> <p>That line turned out to be the clue.</p> <p>I was blaming GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.6 for latency that was happening before either model saw a single token.</p> <p>Once I traced the full request path, the biggest speed wins came from fixing cold starts, queue handoffs, and webhook behavior — not from shaving

Evidence

I thought prompt tweaks would fix my slow agent, but the real win was chasing cold starts first

Source