AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is rolling summary?
Rolling summary (also called Conversation summarisation): A running short summary of earlier conversation that the model updates as new turns arrive and sends along with recent messages. It keeps key facts alive while using far fewer tokens than the full history.
Rolling summary: an example
After 30 turns, the prompt holds a 150-word summary plus the last 4 messages.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Schema-constrained generation
- Scratchpad
- Seed parameter
- Self-ask
- Self-consistency
- Self-refine
- Skeleton-of-Thought
- Sliding window history
Where you learn it
Rolling summary is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.