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. 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, without any cross-contamination.

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. You can see and edit this intent in the Profile tab of the Resources drawer inside the workspace window.

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 name can be edited from the Profile tab inside the workspace window. If the workspace's purpose has evolved substantially, updating the name helps Varen recalibrate the intent accordingly.

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. Use the Sessions tab inside the workspace window to see all sessions and switch between them. Click + New 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.

The turn tree — branching conversations

Every session stores its conversation as a tree, not a flat list. The branch you're currently following is called the active path. This design matters because Varen lets you edit any earlier turn in a conversation and continue from that point, creating a parallel branch while the original branch is preserved.

Why would you want this? Suppose you asked "what are my options for a kitchen extension?" and received an answer. You want to explore one of those options in depth, but rather than continuing down the existing thread and losing context, you want a fresh approach. Edit the original question to be more specific — "what's involved in a rear-of-house single-storey kitchen extension, structurally and from a council perspective?" — and Varen answers from that new framing. The original thread is still there to come back to. You can have multiple branches exploring different framings of the same starting situation.

To edit a turn: hover over any user message to reveal the pencil icon. Click it to edit the text and re-submit. A new branch is created from that point. The original assistant response and any conversation that followed it are preserved on the original branch.

The flow chart on the right side of the chat thread shows every turn and branch in the session as a diagram. Each node represents a turn. Click any node in the flow chart to make that branch the active path, allowing you to move between branches without losing anything.

Deleting turns

The trash icon on the most recent user turn removes that turn and all branches beneath it. You can only delete from the leading edge of the active path — earlier turns in the middle of the tree cannot be deleted directly, because doing so would invalidate all the conversation that followed them. If you want to start fresh from an earlier point, edit that turn to create a new branch instead.