Sessions and versions
Talk with an agent today, and it remembers nothing of what you told it yesterday. Yet it still knows its job, and if it does that job differently than it did yesterday, you can find out why. Both facts come from the agent having two kinds of history. Yesterday's conversation was a session, and each session starts fresh. The job lives in the agent's configuration, and the configuration is versioned, so every change to it is recorded. This page explains what belongs to each.
A session is one conversation
A session is one conversation with an agent. An agent can have many sessions, and they run independently of each other.
Each session carries its own conversation and nothing from the others. That is why the agent starts today with no memory of yesterday: yesterday's messages belong to yesterday's session. What the agent does carry into every session is its configuration: the instructions, skills, tools, and permissions you gave it.
What is scoped to a session, and what belongs to the agent
| Scoped to one session | Belongs to the agent |
|---|---|
| The conversation and its messages | The instructions |
| The session folder and anything the agent downloads or writes into it | The skills |
| The connected tools and MCP servers | |
| The permission settings | |
| The harness and model it runs on | |
| The agent folder and everything in it |
An agent has folders on both sides of that line. The session folder is scratch space that goes away when the session ends. The agent folder is shared by every session of that agent and persists. Files and knowledge covers both, and covers the pattern of writing what the agent learns into the agent folder so later sessions can find it.
Every change to the configuration is recorded as a version
An agent's configuration is versioned. Each change is committed, so the agent has a history you can review and compare, the same way you would with code.
Version history is how you find out why an agent behaves differently than it did yesterday. An agent's behavior is the product of its configuration, so when it starts answering differently, refusing work it used to do, or reaching for the wrong tool, the cause is usually something that changed: a line added to the instructions, a new skill, a tool that was removed, a different model. The history shows you which.
The history also records changes the agent makes to itself. In Agenta you build an agent by chatting with it, and the agent can change its own configuration as you do. You describe what you want, it edits itself, and those edits are recorded like any other change. The history is what lets you see what it did and go back.
Related
- Files and knowledge explains the session folder and the agent folder in full.
- Agents covers what makes up the configuration that gets versioned.
- Cost and usage explains why a long session costs more per turn than a short one.