Question

A developer is building a customer support chatbot with the Messages API. They want to send a conversation that includes the user's first question, Claude's first answer, and the user's follow-up question in a single API request so Claude can respond with full context. How should the `messages` array be structured?

Accepted Answer

An array alternating roles: a user message, then an assistant message, then another user message

Answer

A single user message containing the entire conversation transcript as one concatenated string

Answer

Two user messages placed first, followed by one assistant message at the end

Answer

A system message for the user's question, an assistant message for the answer, and a system message for the follow-up