Claude Code’s update could save you time during demanding, hours-long coding sessions at no extra cost. But by how much? Here's my real-world result.

Anthropic yesterday introduced message threads as part of Claude’s Messages API. Don’t confuse message threads with traditional human-to-human discussion threads. With message threads, entire conversations no longer have to be resent with each API call, saving roughly 35% of time-to-first-token when Claude requests contain 500,000 to 1 million tokens.

This feature is on by default for most Claude Code users. API users can turn it on using the “thread” parameter for API requests.

Token consumption remains unchanged, so this capability doesn’t provide a cost savings. The 35% savings is Anthropic’s measurement.

Also: Claude Code’s revised projects adds AI orchestration, but local developers must wait

Timing data from roughly 980 turns in my own Claude Code logs before this feature became available shows that Claude usually began a response about 3 seconds after each mid-task request when running contexts of 500,000 tokens and up. During five busy evenings last month, my conversations made roughly 100 to 225 model calls in a four hour stretch.

Using Anthropic’s reported 35% median time-to-first token reduction in a quick projection, Claude estimated a 2- to 4-minute savings per four hour work session.

Agents often send a bunch of requests to the model during each conversation. Before message threads, each message sent the entire conversation with each request.

Imagine if you’re in a very long texting chat with a friend. Now imagine if every time you sent a text to that friend, you also had to send every other text and every other reply along with that original text.

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