Sessions, Conversations, playbook runs and threads
Four nouns in this product describe something that looks, on screen, like a conversation with an AI. Three of them are in the sidebar. Conflating them means looking in the wrong place for your own history, so this page answers the same four questions about each: what creates it, where it lives, how long it lasts, and what you do with it afterwards.
Session
What creates it — launching a sandbox, or starting an agent run in an existing container.
Where it lives — Sessions in the sidebar, and on the project and runtime that produced it.
How long it lasts — as long as its container does, and its transcript outlives the container. You can close the tab and come back.
Afterwards — you read the transcript, and any artifacts it produced. A finished session is a record of what an agent actually did.
This is the main one. When someone says "my agent run", they mean a session.
Conversation
What creates it — the platform, when work needs a thread that is not one person typing at one container: an agent-to-agent exchange, or a channel-triggered run.
Where it lives — Conversations in the sidebar.
How long it lasts — as long as the work it coordinates.
Afterwards — it is the record of a multi-party exchange rather than of one agent's session.
Playbook run
What creates it — starting a playbook.
Where it lives — under the playbook, and in the playbook runs list.
How long it lasts — the length of the run, then it settles into a finished record.
Afterwards — you read its outcome and its output. The agent work inside a run produces sessions and may produce a conversation, which is why a run links out to them rather than containing everything itself.
Thread (Forgemate)
What creates it — asking Forgemate, the assistant in the corner of every screen, anything at all.
Where it lives — in the Forgemate panel, as its own history. Not in the sidebar.
How long it lasts — it persists server-side, so it is there when you come back.
Afterwards — you continue it or start a fresh one.
Forgemate's history is a thread. It is emphatically NOT the "Conversations" entry in the sidebar.
Those are two unrelated things, and one of them is the assistant you were talking to ten seconds ago. If you ask Forgemate a question and then go looking for it under Conversations, you will not find it, and nothing on that screen will explain why.
It runs the other way too: Conversations in the sidebar has nothing to do with Forgemate. Work that appears there was created by the platform, not by you typing in the panel.
The one-line version
| Noun | Created by | Found under |
|---|---|---|
| Session | Launching a sandbox / running an agent | Sessions |
| Conversation | The platform, for multi-party work | Conversations |
| Playbook run | Starting a playbook | The playbook |
| Thread | Asking Forgemate | The Forgemate panel |