Hello guys,
I’m currently working with the Assistants API (v2) and tried to send a message to a thread using role: "developer" in the body payload. However, I received the following error:
Invalid value: ‘developer’. Supported values are: ‘user’ and ‘assistant’.
I confirmed that:
- I’m using the endpoint
POST /v1/threads/{thread_id}/messages - The
OpenAI-Beta: assistants=v2header is set - I’m using n8n:
My intention was to use role: "developer" to inject internal system-level data into the thread — things like company name, hours of operation, city, business rules, etc. These values are dynamic and change per client, and I would like the assistant to consider them when generating a response, but not treat them as user messages.
Since these are relatively small structured texts, I wanted to avoid setting up a full RAG pipeline, and instead use developer messages as a lightweight way to supply context dynamically.
Can you confirm:
- Is this a valid intended use of the
developerrole? - Are there any known limitations or requirements to enable its use?
- If
developeris not the right approach for this use case, what would be the recommended method?
Thanks in advance for your guidance!
Marcus