Research Session Management

Session lifecycle

A MathLab session follows a defined lifecycle:

1. Tier selection. You choose which AI model to use: Haiku (free), Sonnet (Pro), or Opus (Pro/War Room). Each tier has different capabilities and per-round costs, displayed before you start.

2. Session start. The session initializes. The round counter starts at 0/10. If you are in War Room mode, the corpus panel becomes available.

3. Research rounds. You submit prompts and receive responses, round by round. Each exchange increments the counter. The cost meter updates in real time.

4. Session end. The session completes when you have used all 10 rounds, or when you choose to end it early. The session record is preserved for reference.

5. Restart. You can start a new session at any time. In War Room mode, you can load results from the completed session into the corpus for the next session, maintaining research continuity.

Why 10 rounds

The 10-round limit serves three purposes:

Focus. Open-ended conversations drift. The round limit forces you to plan your questions and use each round efficiently. Experienced users report that the constraint improves the quality of their research process.

Cost predictability. Each round has a known cost based on the selected tier. With a fixed maximum of 10 rounds, the maximum session cost is predictable before you start.

Context management. AI models have context windows — limits on how much text they can consider simultaneously. By structuring work into 10-round sessions rather than indefinitely long conversations, the Lab keeps the context focused and relevant. Long conversations degrade AI response quality as the context fills with early, potentially outdated exchanges.

Session persistence

Completed sessions are preserved in your session history. You can reference past sessions to recall results, compare approaches across sessions, or load prior results into the War Room corpus for continued investigation.

Controls

• The session toolbar provides:
• Corpus — open the document panel (War Room only)
• Classic/Support — mode toggles
• Restart — end the current session and start fresh

These controls are always visible at the bottom of the screen, along with the round counter and cost meter.