Laravel Job Queue for Async AI Processing at Scale
The first time I shipped a feature that called an AI API synchronously from a web request, I wasn't thinking about load. I was thinking about whether the output was good enough. Three days later, a batch of users hit the feature simultaneously, and the dashboard went from responsive to a spinning wheel. Every user sat there waiting 8–12 seconds for a response the server was holding a thread for. The queue existed. I just hadn't used it.