Streaming LLM Responses to Users
Deliver tokens to your users in real time. Learn how streaming works, why it improves perceived latency, and how to consume a streamed completion in code.
Why Stream?
By default an LLM call returns the entire response only after generation finishes. For long answers this feels slow.
Streaming sends tokens as they are produced, so the user sees text appear word-by-word — drastically improving perceived responsiveness.
Time to First Token
Two latency numbers matter:
- TTFT (time to first token): how long until the first word appears
- Total time: until the full answer is ready
Streaming barely changes total time but makes TTFT the number your users actually feel.
All lessons in this course
- Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Function Calling & Tool Use
- Building Simple LLM Agents
- Streaming LLM Responses to Users