Stop Waiting for the Full AI Response: Stream Tokens in Python

Most AI applications wait for the model to generate the complete answer before showing anything to the user. For short answers, that may be acceptable. For longer responses, it can make the application feel slow—even when the model is already generating tokens. Streaming solves this by displaying each part of the response as soon as it arrives. The non-streaming version A standard OpenAI-compatible request may look like this: import os from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI ( api_key = os . environ [ " AI_API_KEY " ], base_url = os . environ [ " AI_BASE_URL " ], ) response = client . chat . completions . create ( model = os . environ [ " AI_MODEL " ], messages = [ { " role " : " user " , " content " : " Explain API gateways in three sentences. " , } ], ) print ( response . choices [ 0 ]. message . content ) This works, but nothing is printed until the complete response has arrived. Stream the response Enable streaming by adding stream=True : stream = client . chat . completions . create ( model = os . environ [ " AI_MODEL " ], messages = [ { " role " : " user " , " content " : " Explain API gateways in three sentences. " , } ], stream = True , ) The request now returns a sequence of chunks instead of one completed response. Loop through those chunks and print the available content: for chunk in stream : content = chunk . choices [ 0 ]. delta . content if content : print ( content , end = "" , flush = True ) print () The user can now see the answer while it is being generated. Complete example import os from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI ( api_key = os . environ [ " AI_API_KEY " ], base_url = os . environ [ " AI_BASE_URL " ], ) stream = client . chat . completions . create ( model = os . environ [ " AI_MODEL " ], messages = [ { " role " : " user " , " content " : " Explain API gateways in three sentences. " , } ], stream = True , ) for chunk in stream : content = chunk . choices [ 0 ]. delta . content if content : print ( content , end = "" , flush = True )