Bridge Input (VAE)

The VAE is the last step of every generation - the thing that turns the latent back into pixels you can see. It's also the node most people replace when colors come out wrong, so it earns a Bridge Input variant in ComfyBridgeIO. Like the MODEL and CLIP bridges, this one is a named landmark on the graph rather than a value the client injects.

Structure: optional value input socket (VAE), single value output socket (VAE). Wire a VAE (from your checkpoint loader, or a dedicated VAE loader if your model ships a separate one) into the input, then feed the output to your VAE Decode node. The client can't serialize a VAE into the JSON patch - it's an in-memory object - so nothing gets injected here. What the node does is tag the spot: the name widget (STRING, default "input_name") shows up in bridge.get_schema() output, so an agent or script reading the workflow knows exactly where the decode path starts.

That's genuinely useful in the agent context because VAE problems are among the most common "why does my image look bad" diagnoses - washed-out colors, grey images, banding are frequently a swapped or broken VAE (the KB's troubleshooting notes this repeatedly). If a workflow has a named VAE bridge, an agent can reason about it ("the decode is at this node, maybe check the VAE") instead of spelunking through an unlabeled graph.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/cbpark84/ComfyBridgeIO

Restart ComfyUI, or ComfyUI Manager → search ComfyBridgeIO → Install. No models shipped by the pack (bring your own VAE), no heavy deps. Optional Python client (pip install -e in the repo; aiohttp, websockets, Pillow). The README's clone URL shows nicekate/ComfyBridgeIO - that's stale, the repo is cbpark84 as above.

Common issues

Same rule as every complex-type bridge: leave the value input unwired and the output is empty, so VAE Decode has nothing to decode and errors. Wire it up inside ComfyUI. And don't expect this node to fix a bad-VAE workflow by itself - it passes through whatever VAE you give it; if the colors are still wrong, the problem is the VAE on the other end, not the bridge.