Recommended system instruction to use chat history?

[jsmith173]

@dosu
What is the recommended system instruction to use chat history?

I have "You are a helpful assistant." but this does not seems correct

[dosubot[bot]]

The recommended system instruction for using chat history is to use a prompt that includes a MessagesPlaceholder variable named "chat_history". This allows you to pass a list of messages to the prompt using the "chat_history" input key. These messages will be inserted after the system message and before the human message containing the latest question. Here's an example setup:

from langchain_core.prompts import MessagesPlaceholder

contextualize_q_system_prompt = (
    "Given a chat history and the latest user question "
    "which might reference context in the chat history, "
    "formulate a standalone question which can be understood "
    "without the chat history. Do NOT answer the question, "
    "just reformulate it if needed and otherwise return it as is."
)

contextualize_q_prompt = ChatPromptTemplate.from_messages(
    [
        ("system", contextualize_q_system_prompt),
        MessagesPlaceholder("chat_history"),
        ("human", "{input}"),
    ]
)

This setup helps incorporate historical messages into the current processing logic ^[1].

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[jsmith173]

Why is here?
"Do NOT answer the question"