Does one need to manually wrap user request's in system prompt for llama3 or does llama_cpp already do it under the hood?

[ch3rn0v]

Suppose I have the following code.

from llama_cpp import Llama

llm_model = Llama(..., chat_format="llama-3", ...)

user_request = "what is the meaning of life?"
response = llm_model.create_chat_completion(
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": user_request,
        }]
    )

Will this generation work properly or do I need to wrap user_request in LLaMa 3's system prompt?

Their proposed system prompt for reference:

<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>system<|end_header_id|>
{system_prompt}<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>
{prompt}<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>

More or less relative discussions I found:

• What kinf of prompt should I use when using llama-2-7b? #6275
• Do the OAI completion endpoints automatically fix the prompt to have the correct format? #6121
• Translation from prompt format to llama.cpp options? #6455

Alas, no definitive answer there.