regardless it seems to me the current

The goal of the condense question mode is to use the chat history to inform a new query

Of course, this is always turned on, and can cause issues as you can see. Langchain agents do a similar thing.

We can look into ways to improve the experience

Thank you. That wasn't clear to me from the documentation. But I could have missed it. The challenge to me is the first prompt. I got frustrated because I felt it ignored my intent.