Recipes & the Cookbook

A recipe is an ordered series of operations that produces media. For how recipes, workflows, and models relate, see Models, Workflows & Recipes -- this page covers how recipes work in detail. Recipes capture what works so you can repeat and refine it.

A recipe is not an automated pipeline. You perform each step, inspect the output, and decide when to proceed. AI generation steps may need several runs before the result is satisfying -- a recipe makes that iteration structured rather than freeform.

What a recipe contains

• A name -- what this recipe achieves (e.g. "Character reference sheet")
• One or more steps -- each step performs an operation: a ComfyUI workflow or a built-in operation

Steps

A recipe step is one unit of work. Steps are performed in order, but you control the pace -- each step can be run as many times as needed before moving on.

Each step performs an operation, which is one of two kinds:

• A ComfyUI workflow -- a workflow JSON from your project library or the platform library.
• A built-in operation -- a platform-provided tool such as image crop, resize, or audio merge that doesn't require ComfyUI.

Two levels of inputs

There are two distinct levels of inputs in OA, and understanding the difference matters.

Operation Inputs is the general term for what a step exposes. The specific vocabulary depends on the step type:

• For ComfyUI workflow steps, the underlying inputs are called App Inputs -- named parameters declared using the ComfyUI App builder. Names like "Input Image 1", "Positive Prompt", "Output Width" are App Input names.
• For built-in operation steps, the inputs are the operation's own structured fields.

At the recipe level, both are referred to uniformly as Operation Inputs. Operation Input names are always Title Case.

Step Inputs are the recipe-level abstraction over Operation Inputs. They exist so that recipes can:

• Give inputs friendlier display names (e.g. "Character" instead of "Input Image 1")
• Group related Operation Inputs into one user-facing slot (a single "Prompt" step input covers the two App Inputs "Positive Prompt" and "Negative Prompt")
• Hide system-managed inputs that users should never touch (e.g. "Filename Prefix")
• Link an input to the output of a previous step

One Step Input maps to one or two Operation Inputs. This mapping is called the binding.

Binding types

Binding	Operation Inputs covered	When to use
Direct	One Operation Input (image, audio, video, text, or number)	Most inputs -- a 1:1 connection
Size	"Something Width" + "Something Height"	Paired dimension App Inputs; the step shows a single "Output Size" control
Prompt	"Positive Prompt" + optional "Negative Prompt"	ComfyUI text generation -- one field split by === into the two App Inputs

The split marker for prompts is a line containing only ===. Text above is the positive prompt; text below is the negative. If the workflow has no negative prompt App Input, the negative text is discarded.

What is hidden at the recipe level

Some Operation Inputs exist in the underlying workflow or operation but are never exposed as Step Inputs:

• Filename Prefix -- system-managed; filled automatically from your project context. Users never set it directly.

Step input display names

Each Step Input has a display name -- the label shown to you. This is purely cosmetic: nothing in the system searches, links, or matches by display name. It can be set to something more descriptive than the underlying Operation Input name (e.g. "Character" instead of "Input Image 1").

Linking step inputs to previous step outputs

Each step input can be linked to the output of a previous step. Click on an input's name to open the settings dialog and choose which step output to link to.

The dialog only shows previous steps whose output type is compatible with the input being configured. A Prompt input shows only steps that produce text outputs; an image input shows only steps that produce image outputs. Steps whose output type is unknown are always shown.

When an input is linked and you select an output thumbnail for the earlier step, the value is automatically populated:

• Media inputs (images, audio, video): the linked output file is used as the input file directly.
• Text inputs (including Prompt bindings): the linked output file's text content is read and used as the input value. For .prompt.json files produced by the built-in prompt generator, the positive and negative prompt strings are extracted and placed into the appropriate fields automatically.

For a Prompt binding linked to a .prompt.json file, the positive prompt text is placed above the === separator and the negative prompt below it, matching the format described in the Prompt binding section above.

Because linking operates at the step input level (not the workflow parameter level), a single linked text file can populate both the positive and negative prompt fields in the underlying workflow.

Linking is a convenience, not a constraint. You can still override the value manually before running the step.

Step outputs and output labels

When a ComfyUI step completes, output files are automatically routed to the correct media gallery. Each output node in the workflow has an output label -- by default oa. A workflow can have multiple named outputs by declaring multiple Filename Prefix Operation Inputs with labels (e.g. "Filename Prefix #img1", "Filename Prefix #mask"), which produces distinctly-labelled outputs that subsequent steps can target independently.

See ComfyUI Integration for how output routing works.

Finding operations

When you add a step by clicking +, the operation picker shows all available workflows and built-in operations grouped by category (Image to Video, Text to Image, Audio, etc.). A recently used row at the top surfaces the operations you reach for most often.

Filtered to your AI Models

The picker is filtered to your project's AI Models -- the short-list of models chosen for this project (for why you choose models per project, see Models, Workflows & Recipes). Before you have chosen a set, every model is available. Once you have, any workflow whose models are all outside your selection is hidden from the picker. Operations that do not depend on a specific model -- image crop, resize, audio merge, and similar built-in tools -- always appear.

You can adjust the selection from the Actions tab menu (three-dot button in the header) or on the project's AI Models view. The filter only controls what the picker offers -- it does not change how a workflow executes.

Running a recipe

Steps in a recipe can be expanded and collapsed individually. Expanding a step shows its inputs, controls, and -- after running -- its outputs at the bottom.

Built-in operations (crop, resize, audio merge, etc.) present their controls inline. You perform the operation and save the result. Built-in operations are deterministic, so a single run is usually sufficient.

ComfyUI workflow steps give you two choices before running:

Where to run:

• Local ComfyUI -- runs on your machine via the Chrome extension
• Comfy Cloud -- runs on managed GPU infrastructure

How to run:

• Queue -- submitted asynchronously; OA watches and saves results automatically
• Copy workflow -- copy to clipboard to paste into ComfyUI directly for interactive use

Recipe templates and the Cookbook

Recipes come from two places:

• Recipe templates are the read-only starting points -- built-in ones shipped with the platform, plus any custom ones defined in the project's Recipe templates settings. Like every template, you copy one to start and your copy is yours to change.
• The Cookbook is a library of saved recipes available for reuse -- the ones you (or the AI) have run and kept. Each time a recipe is used, it receives an implicit upvote, which helps the AI recommend recipes in future.

Load as Recipe on any gallery item reconstructs a recipe from that item's ancestry -- the workflow steps and input configuration that produced it. You can save this to the Cookbook or upvote an existing matching recipe.

See Cookbook for the page reference.