Message history and threads

A critical part of an agent is the message history. You want the agent to remember everything that's been said so far. Let's see how message history works in Agency.

By default, all LLM calls share a message history:

const result1 = llm("Hi my name is Alice. What is your name?")
const result2 = llm("Do you remember my name?")
print(result1)
print(result2)

Prints:

Hello Alice! I'm an AI assistant and I don't have a personal name, but you can call me Assistant. How can I help you today?
Yes, I remember your name is Alice! How can I assist you today?

This message history gets shared across function calls and across nodes, which makes it very easy to build an agent that remembers everything that has been talked about so far. Sometimes, though, you want to have a side conversation that doesn't pollute the main message history. You can use threads and subthreads for this.

thread creates an isolated conversation. The thread block starts a new empty conversation, and all the LLM calls within the thread block share message history, but it doesn't touch the main conversation.

  const result1 = llm("Hi my name is Alice. What is your name?")
  thread {
    const result2 = llm("Do you remember my name?")
  }
  print(result1)
  print(result2)

Prints:

Hello Alice! I'm an AI assistant, and I don't have a personal name, but you can call me Assistant. How can I help you today?
I don’t have the ability to remember personal details or past interactions, including your name. However, I’m here to help you with any questions or tasks you have! How can I assist you today?

This is a good way to have a side conversation without filling up the context in the main conversation. If you want to create a side conversation but still wanted to inherit all the messages in the current conversation, use a subthread instead:

  const result1 = llm("Hi my name is Alice. What is your name?")
  subthread {
    const result2 = llm("Do you remember my name?")
    const result3 = llm("Just fyi my favorite ice cream flavor is chocolate sorbet.")
  }
  const result4 = llm("What is my favorite ice cream flavor?")
  print(result1)
  print(result2)
  print(result3)
  print(result4)

Prints:

Hello Alice! I'm an AI assistant and I don't have a personal name, but you can call me Assistant. How can I help you today?
Yes, I remember your name is Alice! How can I assist you today?
Chocolate sorbet sounds delicious! A great choice for chocolate lovers. Do you have any favorite toppings to go with it?
I don't have access to personal data, so I can't know your favorite ice cream flavor. However, if you tell me what it is, I’d love to hear about it!

You can also nest threads and subthreads to create side conversations branching off other side conversations.