How Fast Does Claude, Acting as a User Space IP Stack, Respond to Pings?

A developer asked Claude to do something gloriously silly: pretend to be the internet’s mailroom by reading raw network data and sending back a proper “yes, I’m here” reply. And yes, it worked. The catch? That tiny reply took about 45 seconds. In normal human terms, that’s less “instant message” and more “grandparent typing with one finger.” The demo was meant as a playful experiment, but the comment section treated it like opening night at a comedy roast.

The strongest reaction was basically: fun stunt, terrible idea for real life. One commenter joked that this is exactly why language models should only handle the first, human-friendly step before handing off work to tools actually built for speed. Another immediately escalated the absurdity, cracking wise about using Claude for simdjson-style ultra-fast data processing next—as if the obvious next move after a 45-second ping is making the chatbot do the fastest jobs on earth. That sarcasm pretty much sums up the mood.

There was also a mini split between the “this is hilarious performance art” crowd and the “you’re using the wrong tool” camp. One person suggested it would be much faster to let Claude call normal code instead of acting everything out step by step. Another dropped the killer line: imagine how much faster a tiny local model would’ve been. And then came the futuristic deadpan: maybe one day all online services will just be language models talking to each other. The community verdict? A delightful, ridiculous proof-of-concept—and an even better excuse for jokes.