Measured against Open WebUI on the same question, sampling every 250ms:
it never showed a raw pipe. A real <table> appeared with 2 rows at
t+3.25s and grew to 4, then 6, as they arrived.
The blank-line rule alone cannot do that, and a table is the case it
serves worst: a markdown table contains no blank line, so the whole of
it stayed in the tail as plain text until the line *after* it landed,
then snapped into place. That is the markdown flash, on exactly the
content where it shows most.
So a table is now rendered while it is still arriving: once there is a
header, the |---| rule and one body row, the tail is rendered as
markdown rather than held as text, and every complete row that follows
joins it. A half-typed row is left out and appears a frame later, which
is what makes the table grow a row at a time.
Re-rendered each frame rather than appended, unlike a settled block: the
rows arriving next carry no header of their own, so they cannot be
parsed as a separate chunk. The tail is small, so the cost is small.
The status was the other half of that trace: Open WebUI keeps a skeleton
beside the streaming content until the answer is done. Ours removed the
status the instant the first token landed — the moment it becomes most
useful, because the answer is arriving *and* the assistant is still
working, drawing a figure or completing a cut-off reply. It now sits
above the partial answer, shimmering, until the final render replaces
the bubble.
And the wait itself says what is happening. Retrieval finishes before
the stream opens — deliberately, so a bad request still returns an error
rather than a stream — which makes that first line the only thing a
reader has during the slowest part. "Retrieving and synthesizing
references" described the software; "Searching the clinical library"
describes the work.
Mutation-tested: dropping the table rule, rendering the incomplete
trailing row, showing a table with no body row, or failing to restore
the status each frame all fail a test.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Dv6sqaY6Vq3ChZHMem3cnU
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