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Concept

Conversation History

Conversation History is the stateful record of prior interactions between a user and an agent, injected into the prompt to provide temporal context. In RAG, it allows the system to resolve anaphoric references (e.g., 'What about its price?') by re-writing queries based on previous turns, balancing the trade-off between context depth and token-limit constraints.

Definition

Conversation History is the stateful record of prior interactions between a user and an agent, injected into the prompt to provide temporal context. In RAG, it allows the system to resolve anaphoric references (e.g., 'What about its price?') by re-writing queries based on previous turns, balancing the trade-off between context depth and token-limit constraints.

Disambiguation

Refers to the operational memory window used for reasoning, not long-term archival storage or audit logging.

Visual Metaphor

"A rolling teleprompter that only displays the last five minutes of a script to an actor to keep them in character."

Key Tools
LangChain (ChatMessageHistory)LlamaIndex (ChatMemoryBuffer)RedisZepOpenAI Messages API
Related Connections

Conceptual Overview

Conversation History is the stateful record of prior interactions between a user and an agent, injected into the prompt to provide temporal context. In RAG, it allows the system to resolve anaphoric references (e.g., 'What about its price?') by re-writing queries based on previous turns, balancing the trade-off between context depth and token-limit constraints.

Disambiguation

Refers to the operational memory window used for reasoning, not long-term archival storage or audit logging.

Visual Analog

A rolling teleprompter that only displays the last five minutes of a script to an actor to keep them in character.

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