None of the old way felt fast: staring at blank screen for 3–10 seconds while the model computes. With SSE, each token shows instantly—perception improves even if total time is unchanged. On one GPT-4 deployment, time-to-first-token went from 3 seconds to 150 ms; the full reply still needed 10 seconds. Over five years, we've added streaming to more than 30 projects—chatbots, assistants with memory, and None of the simple query tools. Our integrations span OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-weight models. Streaming cuts perceived wait by 80% and reduces support ticket volume by 30%. Faster first word lifts conversions by 15%.
Why SSE Fits Token Delivery
SSE is a standard browser API—None of the extra libraries. Unlike WebSocket, it's one-way (server to client) over HTTP, so it passes through proxies like Nginx without issue. For LLM token streaming, this is perfect: each chunk arrives as an event. None of the complexity of bidirectional protocols. Our implementation uses None of the custom parsing; the browser handles it natively.