> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://comfyui-mcp.artokun.io/docs/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Panel-owned sessions: your conversation now survives workflow switching > The comfyui-mcp Panel agent used to treat every ComfyUI workflow tab as a separate conversation — switch, save, or rename a workflow and your chat emptied mid-task. Now the conversation is the unit of continuity: the orchestrator rebinds the live agent across tabs (no respawn, so even in-memory Ollama models keep their history) and mechanically tells it which canvas it's driving. *by [artokun](https://github.com/artokun) · July 17, 2026 · panel · sessions · architecture* A user on our Discord filed the kind of report that stings because it's completely correct: **"the context window empties on workflow change."** You'd be deep in a session — the agent has read your graph, downloaded a LoRA, has three turns of context about what you're building — then you tab over to another workflow to check something, tab back, and the chat is a stranger. Or worse: you hit **Ctrl+S** on the workflow the agent just built for you, and *the act of saving it* reset the conversation about it. Their proposed fix was better than a bug report. The agent window, they said, should **ride in a layer above the workflows** — not live inside any one of them. That's exactly what shipped in Panel 0.9.0, and this post is about why the fix was harder than "just don't reset the chat," the trap hiding in the obvious implementation, and the codeword test that proved it works. ## The old model: one workflow, one conversation The original design wasn't an accident. Every workflow tab got its own identity — a saved file becomes `wf:`, an unsaved scratch tab gets a minted `tmp:` — and the panel keyed **everything** to that id: the chat thread, the agent session, the socket's tab mapping on the orchestrator. Switch workflows and the panel would re-hello under the new id and resume *that* workflow's session, or open a blank one if it had never had a chat. For some usage that's genuinely nice: each project keeps its own thread, and flipping to your inpainting workflow flips to your inpainting conversation. The per-workflow code even grew careful edge handling — saving an unsaved workflow **adopts** the temp thread onto the new file identity, and renaming a saved one migrates the thread to the new path, because ComfyUI mutates the same workflow object's path in place on rename. But watch what it does to the primary use case. The Panel agent is a *builder* — you ask it to construct a workflow, it creates one, and the moment that new tab becomes active… the conversation that created it is gone from view. Save it: the id flips from `tmp:` to `wf:` and you'd better hope the adoption bookkeeping catches it. The user's mental model is one continuous collaboration; the panel's model was a filing cabinet. ## The design decision: the conversation is the unit of continuity The fix inverts the ownership. In the new default mode, the **conversation belongs to the panel**, and the workflow is just **the canvas the agent is currently pointed at**. Switching, saving, renaming, or creating workflows must never swap or reset the chat — full stop. Mechanically, a workflow change now does exactly three small things (`onWorkflowMaybeChanged` in the panel): 1. **Re-target the socket.** The panel re-hellos under the new tab id, so run outputs and canvas events route to the workflow you're actually looking at — and the orchestrator drops the old mapping so a background workflow's output can't leak into your feed. 2. **Rebind the live agent.** The bridge stamps the hello with `migrated_from`, and the orchestrator moves the **running agent instance** from the old tab id to the new one. No teardown, no respawn — the same process, same context window, now addressed by a new id. 3. **Arm a one-shot context note.** The next message you send carries a prepended note: *the user switched the open workflow — it is now "X"; your `panel_*` graph tools operate on THIS graph now; re-read it before assuming anything, since earlier turns may refer to a different workflow.* The chat feed just prints `Canvas → workflow-name (same conversation).` and life goes on. That third step deserves a word, because it's a philosophy we keep coming back to: **mechanical, not promptable.** We could have given the agent a memory tool and a system-prompt plea to "check which workflow is active before editing." Tools the model is supposed to remember to call are tools the model forgets to call — usually at the worst moment, mid-task, when its attention is on the render. Instead the retarget is done *to* the agent: the socket moves, the instance is rebound, and the canvas-change note is injected into its next turn whether it thinks to ask or not. There is nothing for the model to forget. ## The trap: `resume_session` silently wipes local models Here's the subtle part, and the reason the obvious implementation is wrong. The legacy switch path sent a `resume_session` frame after re-helloing — "resume session `` on this tab." For Claude that's harmless bordering on elegant: Claude sessions are **disk-backed**, so the manager can tear down the agent, respawn it, and resume from the stored transcript. Reset, resume, nobody notices. But the panel doesn't only run Claude. It runs Ollama models, and other local backends whose entire conversation state lives **in the memory of the running process**. For those, `manager.reset` → respawn is a lobotomy. There's no transcript on disk to resume from; the "resume" succeeds structurally and the history is just… gone. Silently. The agent greets you like it's never met you, and nothing in any log says why. So the panel-owned path deliberately sends **no `resume_session` frame at all**. It never resets. It moves the live instance — which works identically for a disk-backed Claude session and a fully in-memory `qwen3:4b` on Ollama, because neither one is ever asked to die and remember. The comment in the source says it plainly: *deliberately NO resume\_session frame (manager.reset would respawn the agent and wipe in-memory backends like Ollama).* ## The codeword test Verifying this needed the harshest possible backend, so we used a local in-memory model — no disk transcript, no resume safety net, nothing to hide behind. The test: tell the agent a codeword. Switch to a different workflow. Send one message on the new canvas. Then ask: *what was the codeword?* Under the old path, a local model fails this every time — the switch respawned it, and the codeword died with the old process. Under panel-owned sessions it answered immediately, correctly, and without ceremony — because from the model's point of view **nothing happened**. The same process simply followed you to the new tab. It saw a note that the canvas changed, and a question, and it had the answer because it had never stopped being the agent you told. That's the whole feature in one anecdote. Continuity isn't restored after the switch; it's never broken by it. ## The legacy mode is still there Some people genuinely want the filing cabinet — one chat per workflow, threads that flip with the tabs. That mode didn't get deleted; it got demoted to a toggle. **Settings → General → "Conversation follows the panel"** — on by default. Turn it off and you're back to the per-workflow behavior, adoption and rename-migration bookkeeping included. But the default is the layer-above model the Discord report asked for: one conversation riding over all your workflows, an agent that keeps its memory across every tab switch, and a mechanical nudge — never a hope — telling it which canvas it's driving now. *** Run an agent that survives your tab habits: install [comfyui-mcp](https://github.com/artokun/comfyui-mcp) and add the [Panel](../panel). Star the repo or file an idea at [artokun/comfyui-mcp](https://github.com/artokun/comfyui-mcp/issues).