Sessions
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A session is the unit of work in Palette Desktop. It's what makes it safe to share a workspace with your team.
What a session is
When you start a session, Palette Desktop creates a clone of your workspace. The agent works inside the clone. Nothing touches the main workspace folder until you decide it should.
That clone is the sandbox. You can try things, throw things out, start over. Whatever happens in a session stays in the session until you save it back.
This boundary covers the main workspace. A reference marked editable sits outside the clone, so changes to that reference are written directly and are not part of the workspace save-back review.
Why sessions exist
Two reasons.
To make agent work safe. Agents move fast. They write a lot. Without a sandbox, you'd be living with every change the agent made the moment it made it. That doesn't work for shared folders, and it doesn't really work for solo work either.
To make shared workspaces work. If your team is in the same folder, you can't have multiple people writing to it through agents at the same time. Sessions give each person their own clone to work in. Saving back is the moment of coordination.
Creating a session
Click "New session" in Palette Desktop. The clone gets created on your machine. You're in.
You can name the session by what you're working on (e.g., "draft Acme outreach"). Sessions persist between launches, so you can leave one open and come back to it later.
Working in a session
Inside a session, you run chats. One chat or several, your choice. Each chat is a conversation with an agent. The agent reads from and writes to the same sandboxed clone.
You can also run multiple sessions in parallel:
- Different sessions for different angles of the same work
- Long-running work in one, quick tasks in another
- Two teammates working on the same workspace at the same time, each in their own session
Updating a session
Because a session is a clone, the main folder can move ahead while you have a session open, for example when a teammate saves their work back, or when your synced folder changes on another device. When that happens, Palette shows an Update session option on the session. Update it to pull the latest changes into your clone, so you are working on top of the current folder instead of an old copy.
Saving back
When the session is ready, you save it back to the main folder. This is the only moment when work inside the cloned workspace touches the main workspace folder.
Before saving:
- Palette shows you every file the agent changed in the session
- For each file, you can see it as-is or in a red/green diff view
- You approve, edit, or discard each change
What you approve saves back. What you don't is either kept in the session or dropped.
Changes history
Every save-back is logged. You can:
- Browse what changed, when, and from which session
- See past versions as files or in a diff view
- Restore a previous version with one click
If you save something you didn't mean to, you can get back to where you were.
Throwing a session away
If a session went nowhere, you can discard it. The clone is deleted and your main workspace folder is untouched. Changes already made to an editable reference are outside that rollback and remain in the referenced folder.
This is part of what makes agent work feel safe. The cost of trying something is low.
Next
- Agents, the agents you run inside a chat
- Chats, how you actually do work inside a session
- Sharing workspaces, why sessions matter for team work
- Workspaces, the folder a session is cloned from