Your agent workflow takes 30 seconds. Design the streaming UX, including what happens when it fails mid-stream.
Perceived latency is a design surface, not an infrastructure detail. Covers progressive disclosure, SSE vs WebSockets, resumability, and the mid-stream failure question most candidates have never thought about.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Perceived latency is a design surface, not an infrastructure detail. Covers progressive disclosure, SSE vs WebSockets, resumability, and the mid-stream failure question most candidates have never thought about.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.