AddThisFeature

Streaming AI Responses

Show AI output as it is generated so long answers do not look frozen.

involved AI Assistants

What it adds

Incremental rendering of model output as it arrives, with a persisted authoritative copy once the stream closes.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Find the AI surfaces where the user waits on a long response and stream those. Short classification or extraction calls do not benefit and should stay as plain requests.

  2. 2

    Buffer incoming bytes until they form complete characters and complete structural units before rendering, so partial output never appears as broken glyphs or half-open markup.

  3. 3

    Treat the streamed text as provisional. When the stream closes, persist the provider's final message as the authoritative record and reconcile what is on screen against it.

  4. 4

    Give every stream a wall-clock ceiling and a stall detector, and surface a stalled or dropped stream as a clear failed state with whatever partial text arrived kept and labelled.

  5. 5

    Do not build a second, non-streaming code path for the same feature. Stop and Regenerate Controls owns cancellation and re-running; this entry owns transport and rendering, and the two must share one request lifecycle.

Edge cases it handles

8
  • Chunk boundaries fall in the middle of multi-byte characters and inside code fences, tables, and structured blocks. Hold incomplete units in a buffer rather than rendering whatever arrived.
  • A user who cancels expects the work to stop, not just the text to disappear. Abort the upstream request so generation actually ends and no further usage accrues.
  • The rendered stream is not the record. Persist the final response when the stream closes, and if the connection dropped before that, persist the partial text explicitly marked as incomplete.
  • A reconnecting client must resume from a known position or replay from the persisted record. Naively re-subscribing produces duplicated paragraphs in the transcript.
  • Safety flags, citations, and attribution often arrive after or alongside the text they describe. Hold rendering of the affected span, or attach them retroactively, so a citation never points at the wrong sentence.
  • Proxies and load balancers buffer responses, which turns a stream into one long pause followed by a wall of text. Confirm the response actually flushes end to end in the deployed environment.
  • A stream that produces no tokens for a long interval is indistinguishable from a hung connection unless a heartbeat or stall timeout exists.
  • When streaming is unavailable, the feature must degrade to a normal request with a pending state rather than failing outright.

Definition of done

8
  • Long AI responses render incrementally and no partial chunk produces corrupted characters or broken structural blocks.
  • Cancelling a stream aborts the upstream request rather than only hiding text.
  • The final response is persisted as the authoritative record when the stream closes, and incomplete streams are stored and labelled as such.
  • Reconnecting after a dropped connection produces no duplicated or missing text.
  • Citations and safety metadata stay attached to the correct spans of streamed content.
  • Streaming and non-streaming paths share one request lifecycle, and streaming failure degrades to a plain pending request.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.