Async generators in JavaScript provide an elegant way to handle Server-Sent Events (SSE)—especially when dealing with token-by-token or chunked data streams from LLMs.

Let’s explore how they help you handle real-time streaming with ease.

🎥 What is SSE?

SSE (Server-Sent Events) lets the server push text messages to the browser over a single HTTP connection. Each message looks like:

data: Hello

data: world!

SSE is great for:

  • Real-time logs
  • Chat apps
  • Streaming LLM responses

🔄 Enter Async Generators

An async function* lets you:

  • Read from a stream incrementally
  • Use await while iterating
  • Yield chunks as soon as they arrive

✨ Example: Consuming SSE with Async Generator 

async function* parseSSE(stream) {
  const reader = stream.getReader();
  const decoder = new TextDecoder();
  let buffer = '';

  while (true) {
    const { value, done } = await reader.read();
    if (done) break;
    buffer += decoder.decode(value, { stream: true });

    const lines = buffer.split('\n');
    buffer = lines.pop();

    for (const line of lines) {
      if (line.startsWith('data: ')) {
        yield line.slice(6);
      }
    }
  }
}

Usage:

const response = await fetch('/api/stream', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { Accept: 'text/event-stream' }
});

for await (const chunk of parseSSE(response.body)) {
  console.log('Chunk:', chunk);
}

🚀 Benefits

  • ✅ Clean syntax with for await...of
  • ✅ Supports POST & headers (good for LLMs)
  • ✅ Works in Node.js (with fetch polyfill)
  • ✅ Custom parsing logic

🔚 Summary

Async generators give you streaming superpowers with SSE:

  • Handle LLM output in real-time
  • Decode and react to each message chunk
  • Maintain control over request method, headers, and stream parsing

Perfect for modern AI-powered apps using LLM APIs that stream!