Slow LLMs and MCPs are hiding problems
This is a technical note about a problem that is going to bite agentic AI users soon. AI is slow, and Agentic AI is even slower. I develop an MCP server that generates PDF documents, and I work with the Agentic Perseverance Composition Engine daily, and AI seems so, so slow. There’s so much waiting, and every mistake means yet more sitting around. Tasks we know actually take maybe 5 microseconds on an operating system (eg, does a file called Things-to-Do exist?) can take one million time longer – between 2 and 5 seconds. This is because the big brain in the cloud is being consulted multiple times, often with timeouts. It’s a young, unstable and unreliable stack, rather like the early days of MS DOS or the Apple ][. When AI gets hold of the data from your computer via an MCP server it can do some very interesting things, but it is not put together well. ...