summarization manager - add summary prompt to messages

[pgrayy]

Description

Certain models (e.g., nova) require the messages array to start with a user message. The summarization manager however adds its summarization as an assistant message to the beginning of the array and thus is incompatible with certain models. To fix, I am adding the summarization prompt ("Please summarize this conversation") to the beginning of the array in front of the assistant summary message.

Related Issues

#611

Documentation PR

N/A

Type of Change

Bug fix

Testing

How have you tested the change? Verify that the changes do not break functionality or introduce warnings in consuming repositories: agents-docs, agents-tools, agents-cli

• I ran hatch run prepare: Updated existing unit tests
• Ran hatch test tests_integ/test_summarizing_conversation_manager_integration.py
  - Locally altered the tests to use the nova pro model to properly ensure fix works.

Checklist

• I have read the CONTRIBUTING document
• I have added any necessary tests that prove my fix is effective or my feature works
• I have updated the documentation accordingly
• I have added an appropriate example to the documentation to outline the feature, or no new docs are needed
• My changes generate no new warnings
• Any dependent changes have been merged and published

---

By submitting this pull request, I confirm that you can use, modify, copy, and redistribute this contribution, under the terms of your choice.

[pgrayy]

This is the one change I am somewhat worried about. The return type is Optional[list[Message]] and so I feel it should be okay to include the summary prompt. Here is an example of how the method is used.

[Unshure]

Ohh this is clever! At first I didnt think this would work since we only store a single message in the conversation manager state (ref), but since this message is static it should be fine!

[Unshure]

Curious if you thought about just changing the role of the summary message to user?

[pgrayy]

Curious if you thought about just changing the role of the summary message to user?

I did think about this yes and actually tested with it. There were 2 (minor) concerns I had though:

1. Technically speaking, it would be a backwards incompatible change. Very likely though most customers wouldn't notice. I can't really think of a use case where they would be looking specifically at the summary message role either from their stored session or the messages array.
2. Setting the role to user could then lead to 2 adjacent user messages in the messages array and that made me wonder if some models would reject this pattern. At least with the models I tested, this did not cause any problems. Still, I thought I would be safe and setup a conventional pattern of user message followed by assistant message.

Again these are minor concerns and so I could get behind just switching the role type. It would certainly simplify the PR.