New String Methods in Java 11 Java 11 added six new instance methods to java.lang.String. None require any imports — they are part of the standard String class. Method Returns Description isBlank() boolean True if string is empty or contains only whitespace lines() Stream<String> Stream of lines split by line terminators strip() String Removes leading and trailing Unicode whitespace stripLeading() String Removes leading Unicode whitespace only stripTrailing() String Removes trailing Unicode whitespace only repeat(int n) String Returns the string repeated n times isBlank() Returns true if the string is empty or contains only whitespace characters as defined by Character.

By default, Claude generates its response token by token without any deliberate planning step. For most tasks — answering a question, writing a function, explaining a concept — this is fine. The response comes quickly and it is good. For some tasks, it is not enough. Complex multi-step reasoning problems, ambiguous architecture decisions, intricate security analyses — these benefit from Claude thinking through the problem before committing to an answer. That is what extended thinking and adaptive thinking provide.

Building an AI agent that runs autonomously — browses the web, executes code, reads and writes files, persists memory across sessions — requires infrastructure. You need a sandbox, a process that can run for hours without your web server timing out, and a way to resume from where you left off after a network hiccup. Claude Managed Agents, launched in public beta in April 2026, offloads all of that to Anthropic.

If you are calling the Claude API repeatedly with a large system prompt, a big document, or a long codebase context — and you are not using prompt caching — you are paying full price every time for content that has not changed. Prompt caching stores a prefix of your prompt server-side and charges 90% less to read it back on every subsequent request. For applications that repeatedly process the same context, this is the single highest-impact API optimisation available.