At Inspo we design and build software products — and the intelligence inside them — shipped end to end by one team.
It has never been easier to generate software, and it has never been more common for that software to feel slow. Generated code ships with generated habits: heavy bundles, chatty APIs, spinners as a lifestyle. Speed is the discipline that survives generation.
Users decide in milliseconds
People do not benchmark your product; they feel it. An interface that responds under 100 milliseconds feels like a tool. One that responds in a second feels like a form. We built a multiplayer game where the entire product was a latency budget — that discipline now shapes everything we ship.
Where the time actually goes
Payloads: send the data the screen needs, not the data the schema has.
Round-trips: one considered request beats four convenient ones.
The states between states: loading, empty and error views are where slowness becomes distrust.
Models: stream the answer; never make a human watch a cursor think.
Fast is a decision, not an optimisation
Performance work done at the end is triage. Performance decided at the start — in the schema, the API shape, the rendering strategy — is architecture. It costs almost nothing then, and everything later. We decide early, measure always, and treat every hundred milliseconds as interface.
Let’s keep in touch.
More notes from the studio on X and Instagram — product, design and AI, from the people shipping it.
