Anthropic has announced a new feature that aims to speed up long-running Claude Code sessions by reducing the amount of conversation data repeatedly sent to its API, helping developers get responses faster as their coding sessions grow.

Message threads, as it’s called, is available now in public beta for Anthropic’s Messages API and is already enabled by default for “most” Claude Code users, according to an article published by Anthropic on Monday.

The company says that the feature has reduced median time to first token (TTFT) — the time it takes Claude to begin generating a response — by approximately 35% for Claude Code requests containing between 500,000 and 1 million tokens.

Given that it’s now part of the Messages API, the feature also extends beyond Claude Code to developers building their own AI agents, particularly those handling lengthy conversations, repeated tool calls, and large amounts of data.

To understand what’s changed, it’s worth looking at how the Messages API has traditionally handled conversations.

Every time an agent sends a new request to Claude, it includes the entire conversation history. That means all messages and tool calls must be transmitted again, even though the API has previously received them.

For example, a coding agent working through a complex task will likely entail hundreds of API calls. As it reads files and modifies code, the conversation history grows, and by the time that history reaches 500,000 tokens, every subsequent request requires sending those 500,000 tokens again, along with whatever new information has been thrown into the mix.

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