Griptape Prompt Driver: Cohere

Cohere doesn't get the hype Anthropic and OpenAI do, but in agent-land it's quietly excellent - and the Command-R family was built for exactly what this pack does. Long context windows, aggressive tool use, and RAG-style grounded answers are Command-R's whole personality. If you're building a Griptape agent that needs to chew through a big document and answer from it, this driver is a very reasonable choice, often cheaper than Claude for the same work.

The node is a prompt driver like every other brain in this pack: it constructs a Griptape CoherePromptDriver with your settings and emits it on DRIVER, ready to wire into an agent configuration or a RAG response module.

The inputs that matter

• model - dropdown of the Command family. Default command-r-plus, the flagship; command-r is the budget tier, and the command, command-light, and nightly variants are the older generation. For agent work you want command-r or command-r-plus - the "r" is RAG-optimized, which is the whole reason to be here.
• cohere_api_key_env_var - the env-var name, default COHERE_API_KEY. Grab a key at dashboard.cohere.com/api-keys.
• top_k and min_p - Cohere's favored sampling controls. top_k default 40 biases toward the most likely tokens; min_p default 0.1 keeps the tail from getting too wild. Lower min_p = more random.
• max_tokens - -1 default means the model picks; bump it for long-form outputs.

temperature, seed, use_native_tools, and max_attempts_on_fail round out the standard set. Output: DRIVER (PROMPT_DRIVER).

How to think about it

The one genuinely different thing about Cohere here: its native tool use and its RAG support are the best-matched to the Griptape engine's RAG modules. If you're pairing a prompt driver with the pack's RAG response modules, Cohere and the command-r family are the pairing the model was designed for. It's not better than Claude at everything - for long creative writing most people still pick Anthropic - but for "answer from this pile of text and cite where you got it," Cohere is right there with it and usually cheaper.

Installing it

Same pack install: ComfyUI Manager → Griptape → ComfyUI-Griptape, restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/griptape-ai/ComfyUI-Griptape

Set COHERE_API_KEY in Settings → Griptape or your environment and you're done.

Common issues

The usual env-var-name trap applies: put the name COHERE_API_KEY in the field, not the key. Cohere also changes model availability without much fanfare - if a dropdown option 404s, the model's been deprecated and the provider's current list has moved on. And the pack-wide gotchas: griptape[all] pulling a conflicting torch is the most common ComfyUI breakage (reinstall torch with the cu121 wheels), and a stale griptape install shows up as ImportError: cannot import name '...' from 'griptape.drivers' - fix with python -m pip install griptape -U.