Auto Prompter

This is the node the whole pack is named after - the "SDXL Auto Prompter." It's a slot machine for prompts. You give it a subject, flip a pile of dropdowns to random, hit generate, and it assembles a long comma-separated prompt out of curated word lists: a camera, a lighting setup, a pose, an outfit, a photographer to imitate, and so on. It doesn't call any AI, it needs no API key, and it downloads nothing. It's just big hand-built databases and a random number generator, which is exactly why it's fast and free to spam.

You reach for it when you've got a decent checkpoint and no ideas. Batch it, watch what it spits out, steal the combinations you like. It's a brainstorming engine, not a precision tool.

How it works

Every dropdown maps to a category file inside the pack. Set one to random and it picks one entry; set it to disabled and that category sits out; pick a specific value and it uses that. The subject and custom fields are yours to type into - subject is your main thing (you can drop LoRA trigger words in here), custom is prefix styling text. The seed decides the random draw, so the same seed rebuilds the same prompt, and a new seed reshuffles the machine.

The catch worth knowing up front: a lot of the built-in entries are wrapped in double parentheses, like ((cyborg)) or ((long hair)). Those are SDXL-era attention weights. On SDXL and its descendants - Illustrious, Pony, NoobAI - they do real work. On the newer LLM-encoded models (Z-Image, Flux 2, Anima) that weighting syntax is silently thrown away and just becomes literal punctuation in your prompt, so this node is happiest feeding an SDXL-family checkpoint.

Inputs and outputs that matter

There are twenty-odd dropdowns and you will not touch most of them. The few that carry a beginner:

• subject - your core idea. "a woman", "cyberpunk street samurai", a LoRA trigger. Everything else decorates this.
• artform - photography or art, which steers the whole flavor. This is the big lever.
• seed - lock it when you find a prompt you like; roll it to keep gambling.

Leave roles, artist (713 entries), clothing, pose, lighting on random for maximum chaos, or pin the ones you care about and disable the rest for control.

Outputs: prompt is the full assembled string. seed passes through for wiring into your sampler. Then t5xxl, clip_l, and clip_g are the same prompt shaped for different text encoders - clip_l and clip_g for SDXL's two CLIP encoders, t5xxl for Flux/SD3 pipelines. Wire whichever your encode node expects; for a basic SDXL setup, prompt into your CLIP Text Encode is fine.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager is the easy path: search comfyui_dagthomas, install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/dagthomas/comfyui_dagthomas
cd comfyui_dagthomas
pip install -r requirements.txt

The requirements.txt pulls a chunky dependency list (openai, anthropic, google-generativeai, transformers, scipy, blend-modes) because the pack also ships LLM and image-FX nodes. This particular node needs none of that at runtime - but you install the whole pack regardless, so let it finish.

Common issues

The number-one complaint isn't a bug, it's coherence: leave every dropdown on random and you get incoherent word soup - a deep-sea diver in a ballgown at a concert on an alien planet. Tame it by disabling categories you don't want and only randomizing two or three. Think of random everywhere as the demo, not the workflow.

If you're running Z-Image, Flux 2, or another LLM-encoded model and the output feels flat, that's the weighting problem above - the ((parens)) are dead weight there. Strip them, or use one of this pack's LLM nodes instead.

One historical gotcha: very old versions changed ComfyUI's working directory on load and broke the restart button (you'd see a "can't open main.py" error). That was fixed years ago upstream - if you hit it, a git pull in the node folder clears it. The author (dagthomas, known around r/comfyui as "Ed") is responsive and keeps the repo current, so staying updated is the whole fix.