Core Concepts

Core Concepts

Sweet Tea is built around a simple loop: pick a workflow, set your inputs, generate, and review the results. But behind that simplicity is a set of concepts that help everything stay organized as your work grows. This chapter gives you the mental model so nothing feels mysterious later.

Think of it like a recording studio. You've got your instrument (the Engine), a set of sound presets you can tweak (Pipes), a filing system for sessions (Projects), and a playback room where you can listen to everything you've recorded (Gallery). The Library is your shelf of go-to sounds you've saved for reuse.

Engine

The Engine is the ComfyUI runtime that actually generates your images. Sweet Tea doesn't generate images itself — it sends your settings to ComfyUI and manages the results.

You can either let Studio manage a local ComfyUI instance for you (start, stop, monitor) or connect to one you're already running. Either way, the Engine's health status is always visible in the status bar at the bottom of the window.

Tip: If anything goes wrong during generation, check the Engine status first. Most early issues are connection problems, not prompt problems. See ComfyUI Integration for the full setup and diagnosis guide.

Pipe

A Pipe is a ComfyUI workflow wrapped in a clean, usable interface. Instead of wiring nodes in a graph, you see a form with labeled controls — prompts, sliders, dropdowns, toggles — generated from the workflow's actual structure.

Here's what makes Pipes powerful: they're not pre-built templates limited to specific use cases. Any ComfyUI workflow can become a Pipe. You import a raw workflow JSON or .tea package, Sweet Tea reads the graph, and it builds a form from the parameters it finds. You then decide which controls to show prominently, which to tuck under "Advanced," and which to hide entirely.

A well-configured Pipe feels like a purpose-built tool. You open it, fill in the fields that matter, and generate — without ever touching a node graph.

Note: Pipe quality matters. A Pipe with clear labels and sensible defaults lets you iterate fast. A Pipe with dozens of unlabeled technical controls slows you down. The Advanced Pipe Management chapter shows you how to clean up a Pipe's interface after import.

Project

A Project is where your work lives. Every generation happens inside a project context, and that context determines where outputs are saved, how the Gallery filters results, and how you'll find things later.

Think of Projects as folders for creative campaigns. A project called portrait-series-warm-tones keeps everything from that series together — inputs, outputs, masks — separate from your landscape-experiments project.

You can create as many projects as you want, move work between them, and archive projects you're done with to keep your workspace tidy. See Projects & Organization for the full workflow.

Dynamic Forms

When you select a Pipe, the form you see isn't a static interface — it's dynamically generated from the workflow's schema. Each field corresponds to a real parameter in the underlying ComfyUI graph, with its type (text, number, dropdown, toggle, image input) determined automatically.

Forms are split into core controls (the fields you use every run — prompts, resolution, steps) and advanced controls (deeper knobs for fine-tuning). This keeps the daily experience clean while preserving full access when you need it. The Dynamic Forms chapter covers field types, bypass toggles, and form persistence in detail.

Job and Run

When you click Generate, you create a Job — a request that enters the Engine's queue. Once the Engine processes it and produces output, it becomes a Run — a completed execution with an image and full metadata.

This distinction matters when something goes wrong:

Tip: When troubleshooting, knowing whether you have a Job failure or a Run quality issue saves you from chasing the wrong problem. Job failures are infrastructure; Run quality issues are creative parameters.

Gallery

The Gallery is your review surface for everything you've generated. It's not just a grid of thumbnails — it's an operational tool for curating, comparing, and building on your work.

Every image in the Gallery carries its full generation metadata: the prompt, model, sampler, seed, steps, and every other parameter that produced it. You can open any image in the full-screen viewer, inspect exactly how it was made, and re-run those settings with a tweak.

The Gallery also supports keep/discard marking, bulk operations, and moving images between projects and folders. When you want to use a previous output as the input for a new generation (like feeding an image into an img2img workflow), Gallery-to-input reuse handles that directly. Details in Gallery & Results and Image Viewer & Metadata.

Library

The Library is where you save prompt settings and reusable text fragments (Snippets) so you don't have to rebuild your best work from memory.

When you find a prompt configuration that produces great results, save it to the Library. The next time you need that style or approach, pull it up instead of retyping it. Snippets are smaller building blocks — a lighting description, a style phrase, a quality suffix — that you can mix and match across prompts using the Prompt Constructor.

Tags help you organize and find things quickly: cinematic, portrait, dark-moody, whatever taxonomy makes sense for your work. The Tags & Suggestions chapter covers how to build an effective tag vocabulary.

Collections

While Projects organize where work is created, Collections let you organize by purpose. A collection pulls selected images from across multiple projects into a curated group — a client shortlist, a style mood board, a set of reference images for future generations.

Collections reference images rather than copying them, so they're lightweight and flexible. See Collections & Curation for the full curation workflow.

Account Linking and Sync

Sweet Tea works fully offline as a local tool, but if you create a web account at sweettea.co, you can link it to your Studio installation. This enables cloud sync — your Pipes, snippets, and projects can stay in step across devices, and you can save Pipes from the web catalog directly to your Studio workspace.

Account linking also controls entitlements (what features your plan gives you access to) and enables the web publishing flow where you can share your Pipes with other creators. The full setup is in Connecting Your Account.

How These Fit Together

Here's a typical workflow that touches all these concepts:

1. You open Prompt Studio and select a Project (album-cover-concepts) and a Pipe (sdxl-cinematic-v2).
2. The Pipe's dynamic form appears with controls for your prompt, negative prompt, resolution, steps, and a few style toggles.
3. You type your prompt, using a couple of Snippets from your Library for consistent style language, and click Generate.
4. The Engine picks up the Job, processes it, and produces a Run.
5. The result appears in the Gallery, filed under your active Project, with full metadata attached.
6. You open the image in the viewer, like what you see, and save the prompt configuration to your Library for future reuse.

Everything flows from that loop. As you get comfortable, you'll add more Pipes, organize across multiple Projects, build out your snippet vocabulary, and use the Gallery's curation tools to refine large batches of work.

Next: Installation & Setup