Shrug Accumulator

ComfyUI loops are annoyingly stateless. You run a VLM node in a loop twenty times and each iteration starts fresh - there's no built-in place to say "remember all the captions so far, then hand me the combined result at the end." Shrug Accumulator is that memory. It's a graph-scoped string accumulator: append items during a loop, then read them back joined together, pick one out by index, or wipe the slate clean. It's one of the pack's pure utilities - no server, no connection, just state.

It's the kind of node you don't appreciate until the first time you want to collect every VLM response in a loop and summarize them in one call, or buffer a bunch of candidate prompts and pick the best after scoring. Then it's exactly the missing piece.

How it works

The state lives in a class-level dictionary keyed by the node's unique_id, which means each instance you drop into a graph gets its own private list. Two copies of the node in the same workflow don't share anything. The mode combo picks the operation:

• append - push text onto this node's list.
• reset - clear the list.
• read - don't touch the list; just return it joined.
• pick - return the item at index.

The three outputs are always computed: joined (the list joined with delimiter, default a newline), picked (the item at index, empty if out of range or you're not in pick mode), and count (how many items are buffered).

Here's the trap that gets everyone: state is never evicted. The dict persists across workflow runs. If you don't reset at the start of a loop, the previous run's items are still in there and your "one summary" suddenly includes last run's captions. The pack's own docs say it straight: rely on mode=reset between runs. The idiom is a reset accumulator feeding into a loop, with the loop's body appending, and the joined output read after the loop finishes.

Inputs that matter

• mode - the operation, described above.
• text (optional) - what append pushes. Ignored in other modes.
• index (optional, default 0) - which item pick returns.
• delimiter (default \n) - the join separator for joined.

How to install

Standard pack install. ComfyUI Manager → search Shrug-Prompter → Install → restart, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/fblissjr/shrug-prompter

Dependencies are already in any modern ComfyUI (httpx, orjson, pillow, torch, numpy); nothing heavy, nothing to download. A current ComfyUI build is required (V3 extension API).

Common issues

• The list keeps growing across runs. That's the no-eviction behavior. Add a reset pass before your loop.
• picked is always empty. You're not in pick mode, or index is out of range. Note the guard: it returns empty rather than erroring, so an empty string is the silent symptom.
• "Read mode returned nothing." read only echoes what's buffered. If nothing has been appended in this run and the state was never persisted from a prior run (or was reset), it's empty - which is correct, not broken.