# Make the first audio chunk tiny so playback starts before the file exists

- Category: product
- Author: Andrei Statescu (https://indie.md/people/andrei-statescu/)
- Source: https://indie.md/journeys/andrei-naramine/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/make-the-first-chunk-tiny/

A chapter of a web novel runs around ten thousand characters, and synthesizing all of it before playing would mean a long silent spinner. Naramine instead generates a very small first chunk so the play button responds within seconds, then produces progressively larger chunks until the pipeline reaches normal flow, pre-buffering ahead of the listener and preprocessing the next chapter in the background before the current one ends. Minutes of compute still happen, but they hide behind consumption time the listener was going to spend anyway. This is the streaming insight applied to generative products: what users feel is latency to first value, not total processing time, and the two can be decoupled almost completely. Whatever your product generates, slice the work so the first slice is nearly free, ship it the moment it exists, and let the rest of the job run behind the experience instead of in front of it.