munkamenet

in English: session

basicwidespread

A session is a continuous conversation or task with the AI, throughout which the system remembers what was said and done.

In plain terms

Imagine you call a clerk. While on the line, you do not need to reintroduce yourself with every sentence because they remember what you said earlier. If you hang up and call again the next day, a different clerk might answer who knows nothing about your case. The session is this single call: the continuous phase from the start to the end of the connection.

In AI agents, the session is the framework within which an agent works on a task. Everything accumulates here: what you requested, what it answered, the opened files, the searches run, and their results. This allows the agent to build on what it learned in the first step even during the tenth step.

A session is not the same as the AI's persistent memory. What is said in a session stays there by default: a new session starts with a clean slate unless the system has been given separate memory or you explicitly continue a previous one.

How it works

Start: when you begin a new conversation or task, the system creates a session and assigns it an identifier. At this point, default settings and instructions are loaded.
Collection: every message you send, every response from the agent, and every tool usage are chronologically added to the session history.
Re-reading: beyond its learned knowledge, the language model does not remember previous steps, so at each new step it is given everything that came before. This keeps the conversation coherent.
Saturation: the conversation history goes into the model's finite context window. In long sessions this fills up, at which point the system summarizes or drops the older parts.
End or continue: a session ends when you log out, start a new one, or time expires. Many tools save progress so you can resume from the same point later.

An everyday example

You ask an AI assistant to plan a three-day trip to Lake Balaton, then simply write: "make it four days instead, and bring the dog too". It understands what you mean because you are in the same session. However, if you start a new conversation and type the same thing, it will not know which plan you are referring to.

Who is affected

everyoneIf you know that AI typically only remembers within a session, you understand why you must restate details in a new conversation.

employeeFor longer tasks, you get better results if you carry one topic through in a single session and open a new one for a new topic. → Work & HR

developerThe coding agent keeps track of what it has read and modified during the session, so saving, resuming, and splitting sessions is part of daily work. → Code

entrepreneur, executiveSession length affects cost and data handling because the system receives the history at every step and often stores it as well.

A common misconception

MythAI remembers everything I have ever said to it, in any conversation.

In realityBy default, it only sees the content of the current session. It can only build on previous conversations if the service has a separate memory function and it is enabled. For some services, this is enabled by default, so it is worth checking the settings.

Limits and risks

In a very long session, the agent may lose early details because the system compresses or discards old history.
Long sessions can be more expensive and slower because the model receives the entire history again at each step. Providers mitigate this partly through caching.
The provider typically stores the session content, so enter sensitive data only if you know what happens to it.
If you mix multiple independent topics in one session, the agent is more likely to confuse them.

Similar, but not the same

context window – The context window is the finite amount of text the model sees at once, while the session is the conversation itself, which can extend beyond that length.
memory – Memory preserves information across sessions, while session history is valid only for that specific conversation.
login – Login verifies who you are, while the session tracks what you are currently discussing; one account can have many separate sessions.

Related concepts

Broader

AI-agent, agentrendszer

Narrower

session identifier, conversation history

On the edge

context window, memory, status, prompt, token

A brief history

The concept of a session originates from time-sharing systems in computing. It originally denoted the period from a user's login to logout, later becoming a fundamental term for network communication and web services. AI chatbots and agents have adopted this: for them, it refers to a coherent conversation or task execution.

Where things stand

At the end of 2026, virtually every AI chatbot and agent structures work into sessions. Development is heading toward reliable handling of long sessions, running for hours, that can be interrupted and resumed later.

Status: 2026 November

In the news

Appears in 77 Agent Age stories; the curve shows weekly occurrence in the news magazine.

Mindmax raises £2.5m for conversational AI tutorNov 5, 2026 · Education & Family
DeepSeek's open-source Super-Agent prototype positioned as an alternative to Claude CodeNov 2, 2026 · Code
Anthropic adds message threads to its API, but the token bill stays the sameNov 2, 2026 · Code
ChatGPT could soon analyse Health Connect and Google Health data on AndroidNov 2, 2026 · Health
Google's AI cart for checkout goes live ahead of holiday shopping; Merchant Center asks for new conversational attributesOct 26, 2026 · Marketing
K&H turns to conversational banking and presents its Kate assistantOct 26, 2026 · Money
K&H's Kate assistant interprets customer requests in conversation and can initiate transfersOct 21, 2026 · Money
AI interviews: one-way videos, candidates preparing with AI, Google's AI overhaulOct 20, 2026 · Work & HR

Also known as

munkamenet · session · session · conversation · chatting · chat session · agent session · conversation

Sources

Wikipedia: Session (computer science)

This entry was machine-edited and has undergone machine expert review; the “In the news” section updates automatically from Agent Age stories.