Workspaces & Sessions

Workspaces and sessions are the structure that makes Varen useful over time. This guide explains the design intent behind each, how to create and manage them, and how the conversation branching model works.

Why workspaces exist

The defining design choice in Varen is isolation. Over time, Varen builds up a detailed picture of each workspace — what you've said, what it has inferred, what documents you've uploaded, what facts have been confirmed. If all of that accumulated in one place, different areas of your life would contaminate each other. Your tax research would colour your health conversations. Your work planning would bleed into family decisions. A question about a property purchase would carry context from your medical conversations.

Workspaces are the solution. Each workspace has its own knowledge base, its own file store, and its own conversation history, and by default nothing crosses between them. You can have completely separate workspaces for your finances, your health, your home renovation, and your work — each accumulating a deep and accurate picture of that specific domain. When you do want two workspaces to draw on each other, you can explicitly link them so the linked workspaces contribute retrieval context; without that link, they stay isolated.

Creating a workspace

Click New workspace under a connected node in the navigator. Enter a name. The name is not just a label — it carries real significance. Varen derives an intent from the workspace name and the early conversations within it. That intent is used to route questions to the right advisers and to detect when a question doesn't fit the workspace's purpose.

Choose a name that clearly describes what the workspace is for: "Medical 2026", "Home Build", "Business Planning", "Tax & Accounting". Vague names like "General" or "Stuff" produce weaker routing and less useful context accumulation.

Workspace intent

Over time, Varen builds a derived intent for each workspace — a short statement of what the workspace is for, based on the name and the conversations within it. The current intent is shown in the workspace's Knowledge section.

The intent serves two purposes. First, it helps Varen choose the most relevant advisers for each question. A workspace with a strong financial intent will preferentially route finance-adjacent questions to financial and tax advisers, even when the question isn't explicitly about money. Second, when you send a question that seems to come from a completely different domain, Varen may show an intent divergence panel rather than answering immediately. This is a signal that you might be better served by a different workspace — not an error, and not a refusal.

Renaming and deleting workspaces

The workspace's derived intent adapts as the conversations within it evolve. If a workspace's purpose has changed substantially, starting a fresh, clearly-named workspace often produces cleaner routing than trying to repurpose an existing one.

Deleting a workspace is permanent. All sessions, files, and knowledge in that workspace are removed along with it. The trash icon appears on the workspace row in the navigator; a confirmation prompt appears before deletion proceeds to prevent accidental loss.

Sessions

A workspace contains any number of sessions. Each session is one conversation thread. When you open a workspace, you're placed in the most recent session. Click the Sessions (N) button in the workspace header to open the session drawer and switch between sessions. Click New session to start a fresh session.

Multiple sessions exist to keep related but distinct threads separate within the same workspace. In a home-renovation workspace, one session might cover structural plans, another might track plumbing quotes, and a third might deal with council approval. All three sessions share the same knowledge base and uploaded files — so facts captured in one session are available in another — but the conversation threads stay separate and don't run together.

Managing the conversation thread

A session is a single conversation thread. If a response goes in the wrong direction while it's still streaming, use the Stop button on that turn to abort it early, then rephrase your question and send it again.

You can collapse individual turns to reduce clutter as a thread gets long. Collapsing is a view-only action — it hides the turn in the interface but does not delete anything on the node. Expand it again at any time.

To keep a distinct sub-topic separate from the current thread, start a New session from the workspace header rather than continuing in the same thread. Sessions in the same workspace share the same knowledge base and files, so context carries across while the conversation threads stay separate.