I’ve noticed there’s a chat experience and also a canvas where workflows live, and I’m not totally sure when I’m meant to use which. Are they two ways of doing the same thing, or do they serve different purposes? I’d find it helpful to understand what each one is best at so I don’t reach for the wrong tool out of habit.
They overlap, but they’re built for different jobs. The quick way to think about it: chat is where you do a task, the workflow canvas is where you build a thing that does the task, again and again, without you sitting there.
Chat is your personal workspace for one-off, ad-hoc work: brainstorm an idea, analyze a file you drop in, write or test a bit of code, ask a question. It’s conversational and disposable by design. Each chat has its own isolated storage, you can attach connectors to it, and 3B can use tools like web search, file operations, and code execution to help. It’s great precisely because there’s no setup. You just talk.
The workflow canvas is where you build something reusable and runnable. Instead of talking to 3B in the moment, you’re describing an app, tool, or automation that lives on, made of steps, connectors, and code, that can run on a schedule or a trigger and keep working when you’re not watching. That’s the home for anything you want to deploy, monitor, and rely on.
The bridge between them is the Turn into workflow button. When you reach a point at which something is worth keeping, that button carries the context over so you don’t rebuild from scratch. That’s the natural flow: explore in chat, and when it’s worth reusing, promote it to a workflow.
So the rule of thumb: chat when you want an answer or a quick result now, canvas when you want something that runs on its own later!