AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is conversation history?
Conversation history: The list of earlier user and assistant messages sent back to the model so it can follow the thread of a chat. Since models do not remember past calls, managing this list well decides whether replies stay coherent and affordable.
Conversation history: an example
To answer 'And in Hindi?', the request includes the previous English answer so the model knows what to translate.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Delimiters
- Developer message
- Directional stimulus prompting
- DSPy
- Dynamic few-shot selection
- Few-shot chain-of-thought
- Few-shot prompting
- Frequency penalty
Where you learn it
Conversation history is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.