latency-critical-systems

latency-critical-systems is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ronmkr/PromptBook. It costs 42 tokens per session (497 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of latency-critical-systems, Apache-2.0.

Engineering guidance for systems where response time, data freshness, and behavior under load matter, such as streaming services, dashboards, queues, and execution systems.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to map the path from an event to the user's visible result and track latency percentiles, throughput, freshness, caching, and failure behavior.
Why use it?
It prevents the vague goal of being fast from hiding slow sections, stale data, overloaded queues, or incorrect results.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to map the path from an event to the user's visible result and track latency percentiles, throughput, freshness, caching, and failure behavior.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ronmkr/promptbook/latency-critical-systems
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add ronmkr/PromptBook --skill latency-critical-systems
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ronmkr/PromptBook

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for latency-critical-systems

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ronmkr/promptbook/latency-critical-systems/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ronmkr/promptbook/latency-critical-systems)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ronmkr/promptbook/latency-critical-systems"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ronmkr/promptbook/latency-critical-systems/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for latency-critical-systems

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ronmkr/promptbook/latency-critical-systems"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ronmkr/promptbook/latency-critical-systems.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 497 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 91% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00042 $0.00497
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.00249
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00099
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00050

Measured 7d ago against content hash 7c2735b6525c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

latency-critical-systems scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

91% identical to latency-critical-systems — 3 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/engineering/latency-critical-systems/SKILL.md · 74 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 74 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Latency Critical Systems

Use this skill when the user cares about realtime behavior, hot paths, streaming freshness, or execution speed. This includes HFT-like infrastructure, but the skill is engineering-focused. It does not authorize live trading or financial advice.

Split The Metrics

Do not collapse everything into "fast." Track:

  • p50, p95, and p99 latency;
  • throughput;
  • freshness age;
  • queue depth;
  • cache hit rate;
  • provider/API response time;
  • browser render time;
  • correctness under load;
  • failure and retry behavior.

Map The Hot Path

Write the path from user/event to final visible state:

source event -> provider API -> ingest worker -> queue -> cache -> edge route
-> client stream -> browser render -> user-visible state

Then measure each segment separately.

Optimization Order

  1. Remove unnecessary round trips.
  2. Cache stable reads with freshness metadata.
  3. Batch small calls and writes.
  4. Move compute closer to the data or the user.
  5. Split hot and cold paths.
  6. Apply backpressure before queues grow unbounded.
  7. Use streaming only when it improves freshness or user experience.
  8. Add canaries for stale data, degraded providers, and bad cache state.

Verification

Use live readbacks when a deployed surface exists:

  • HTTP timing and response headers;
  • provider freshness timestamp;
  • queue or job state;
  • edge/cache state;
  • browser verification for actual UI freshness;
  • logs around retries and degraded mode.

For market-data or execution-adjacent paths, also verify orderbook age, VWAP assumptions, provider status, and kill-switch behavior before calling the path ready.

Guardrails

  • Do not optimize latency by dropping required validation.
  • Do not hide stale data behind fast cache hits.
  • Do not claim millisecond behavior from client labels without measurement.
  • Do not run live orders, destructive migrations, or customer-impacting deploys without an explicit approval gate.
  • Keep secrets and private payloads out of logs and benchmark artifacts.

Read the full file on GitHub · 74 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 74 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 7c2735b6525c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

latency-critical-systems is a skill published in the GitHub repository ronmkr/PromptBook (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 497 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 91% identical to latency-critical-systems, differing in 3 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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