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Prompt Management#

System Prompts#

Agents can be initialized with a static system prompt. You can provide a single string or a list of strings:

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from autogen.beta import Agent

# Single string prompt
agent = Agent(
    "assistant",
    prompt="You are a helpful agent!"
)

# List of strings prompt
agent2 = Agent(
    "assistant2",
    prompt=[
        "You are an expert in Python.",
        "Be concise."
    ]
)

Dynamic Prompts#

On conversation startup#

System prompts can be generated dynamically when a conversation starts. This is useful when the prompt depends on external state or initial context. You can achieve this by using the @my_agent.prompt decorator or passing a synchronous or asynchronous function.

Dynamic prompt functions support the same powerful execution context capabilities as Agent Tools. For more detailed information on specific context features, see Dependency Injection, Context Variables, and Human-in-the-loop.

Dynamic prompts are evaluated only once at the beginning of the conversation, and their results are appended to the static prompts and reused for subsequent turns.

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from autogen.beta import Agent, Context

agent = Agent("assistant")

@agent.prompt
async def dynamic_sysprompt(ctx: Context) -> str:
    # Generate prompt dynamically based on the initial event or context
    return (
        "You are a helpful agent. "
        f"The current context is {ctx.variables}."
    )

Alternatively, you can pass a callable directly to the prompt parameter, or mix static strings and callables in a list:

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from autogen.beta import Agent

def get_sysprompt() -> str:
    # Returns a string for the prompt, evaluated at the beginning of the conversation
    return "This is dynamically generated."

agent = Agent(
    "assistant",
    prompt=["Static prompt part.", get_sysprompt]
)

On each conversation turn#

While dynamic prompt hooks are evaluated once per conversation, you might need to update the prompt dynamically on each turn. You can do this by mutating the prompt list within the Context directly between calls to reply.ask().

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# Initial conversation turn
reply = await agent.ask("Hi, agent!")

# Change the prompt for the next turn
reply.context.prompt = ["You are now a funny agent!"]
await reply.ask("Tell me a joke")

You can also completely override the agent's default prompt for a specific run or turn by passing the prompt parameter directly to ask():

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# Overrides the default prompt for this conversation
reply = await agent.ask(
    "Hi!",
    prompt=["Temporary prompt for this run"]
)

Prompt updates#

For continuous and event-driven prompt updates, you can mutate context.prompt dynamically from an event subscriber. This allows you to respond to specific events in the stream and adjust the agent's behavior on the fly during an ongoing conversation. See the Stream documentation for more details on this advanced feature.

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from autogen.beta import Agent, Context, MemoryStream
from autogen.beta.events import ModelRequest

agent = Agent("assistant", prompt="You are a helpful assistant.")
stream = MemoryStream()

@stream.where(ModelRequest).subscribe()
async def mutate_prompt(event: ModelRequest, context: Context) -> None:
    # Update the prompt dynamically when a ModelRequest is triggered
    if "joke" in event.content.lower():
        context.prompt = ["You are now a comedian."]

await agent.ask("Tell me a joke", stream=stream)