Questions about message mechanism

[PanQiWei]

Question

Hi, team! First of all, thanks a lot for you guys bring us this great framework!

However, I have some questions about the message mechanism under the hood that I couldn't find answers in the documentation:

• can we customize the name of each message manually? if so, how; otherwise, why?
• is the agent's system prompt will not prepend to the final messages if we manually specify message_history
• is there any best practice recommend to persist messages to storage or exchange messages among pydantic-ai agents?

It would be very helpful if any one can help me deeply understand the message design mechanism and philosophy, thanks again!! ❤️

Additional Context

No response

[DouweM]

• can we customize the name of each message manually? if so, how; otherwise, why?

@PanQiWei Which message name are you referring to? None of the types under pydantic_ai.messages have a name field.

• is the agent's system prompt will not prepend to the final messages if we manually specify message_history

See https://ai.pydantic.dev/agents/#instructions for more information on this on how system prompts and instructions interact with message history.

• is there any best practice recommend to persist messages to storage or exchange messages among pydantic-ai agents?

Have you seen https://ai.pydantic.dev/message-history/#storing-and-loading-messages-to-json?

[PanQiWei]

• can we customize the name of each message manually? if so, how; otherwise, why?

@PanQiWei Which message name are you referring to? None of the types under pydantic_ai.messages have a name field.

• is the agent's system prompt will not prepend to the final messages if we manually specify message_history

See https://ai.pydantic.dev/agents/#instructions for more information on this on how system prompts and instructions interact with message history.

• is there any best practice recommend to persist messages to storage or exchange messages among pydantic-ai agents?

Have you seen https://ai.pydantic.dev/message-history/#storing-and-loading-messages-to-json?

Thank you very much for the reply! It turned out that I hadn't read the doc carefully, all answers of above questions are solved after reading corresbonding documents and source codes.