WORLDTECHAnthropic cuts Claude Code response lag nearly 3x to 1.33 seconds
What happened
Where the seconds went The update was announced on October 17, 2026, through the ClaudeDevs account. The latency (the delay between asking for something and getting it) reduction enhances developer productivity and positions Anthropic's Claude as a more competitive player in the AI coding market. Anthropic is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, and its products and services include Claude and Claude Code.
17, 2026 Anthropic has made Claude Code noticeably less sluggish.
First-token latency for local sessions fell from 4.07 seconds to 1.33 seconds between August and October 2026, an improvement of nearly 3x. The fix was not a new model or an exotic breakthrough.
It came from compressing conversation data and starting cloud sessions before users finish typing. It covers several Claude products, with the headline gains in Claude Code.
The key metric is first-token p90 latency. First-token (the small pieces of text a model reads and writes) latency is how long you wait before the model starts producing any reply at all.
The p90 label means 90% of requests came back faster than that figure. For local Claude Code sessions, that p90 number dropped from 4.07 seconds to 1.33 seconds.