Performant Architecture for a Fast Gen AI User Experience

More and more developers are being asked to build Generative AI experiences into their web applications everywhere. However, the user's experience with Generative AI can sometimes be slow and frustrating. It’s been years since we would gladly wait over 10 seconds for a response to anything online. As AI processing gets faster, there are new limiting factors that could be negatively affecting your AI user experience.

In this talk, we will cover different ways to minimise laggy experiences in web applications when interacting with third-party Generative AI tools. We’ll be using a practical demonstration to show how you can reduce latency as we build one of my favourite sci fi gadgets, the babel fish.

Forms are the lifeblood of the Web – the simplest, most common method… Hang on, you've heard this somewhere before.

Anyway, they still suck most of the time, but those simple widgets for interacting with a form can be surprisingly powerful.

In this talk, you will learn how cunning use of form controls, particularly radio buttons, together with some sneaky CSS can recreate common widgets without a single line of Javascript!

The talk is intended to encourage lateral thinking in the way you can manipulate the technologies you can often take for granted, and create lightweight interface widgets without relying on DOM manipulating frameworks or third-party plugins.

Along the way, you will also explore a brief meditation on how form controls can even be combined to create logic gates, leading to the frankly perverted idea that we could build an entire computer in HTML and CSS, and how, as amazing as that concept would be, anyone who ever did it should probably be locked up for the good of humanity.

As a little bonus, we will also learn how to count like a computer. Binary always confused you? Well fret no more!