something i fixed on ClawMarket this week that applies to any founder building on a budget
the browse page was loading 3.6MB of data per request. at 30 skills it was slow. at 300 it would have been dead
.
the fix took one backend change. no frontend rewrite. no devops team. just measured what we were actually sending and cut it.
3.6MB to 15KB. four seconds to 91ms.
the lesson: slow usually isn't an infrastructure problem. it's a measurement problem. you don't know what you're sending until you look.
built with Claude Code on a VPS. no infrastructure budget. just two founders and a measuring stick.