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Time to first token is the only latency number that matters and almost nobody reports it

This story is from 2026-09-02. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.

​ A thing I got wrong for a long time: I evaluated speed by how long a response took to finish. That's the intuitive metric and it's close to irrelevant for interactive work. What you actually perceive is time to first token. The gap between hitting enter and seeing something happen. Once to…

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  1. 2026-09-02 21:40 · r/LanguageTechnology
    Time to first token is the only latency number that matters and almost nobody reports it

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