Building better chat experiences with context and memory

Great chat products feel effortless. Under the hood, they require careful attention to context windows, streaming UX, and grounding.

Context management

Long conversations exceed model limits quickly. We recommend a tiered approach:

1. Recent messages — always include the last N turns verbatim
2. Summarized history — compress older turns into a rolling summary
3. Retrieved context — inject relevant documents via RAG when needed

Streaming best practices

Users perceive latency through the first token. Optimize for:

• Immediate typing indicators
• Incremental markdown rendering
• Graceful cancellation when the user sends a follow-up

for await (const chunk of stream) {
  appendToken(chunk.delta.content);
}

Citations and trust

When answers draw on external sources, surface citations inline. Users should always be able to verify claims without leaving the thread.

Ground every factual claim in a retrievable source — or say you don't know.