A student's document-summary feature timed out on long PDFs because the whole pipeline ran inside one synchronous HTTP request. Some AI tasks are simply too slow for that pattern.
The fix: submit, poll, notify
- The API endpoint accepts the task and immediately returns a job ID — it does not wait for the AI call to finish.
- A background worker (a queue, a simple polling loop, or a serverless function) processes the job separately.
- The frontend polls a status endpoint, or the backend pushes a notification, when the job completes.
When you need this
Anything likely to take more than a few seconds — long-document processing, multi-step agentic tasks, batch operations. A quick chat reply doesn't need this; a full-document analysis usually does.
See notebook to production checklist for where this fits into a broader deployment plan.
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
