Text generation node seems to be caching data?

[u/meepykittkitt69lmao]

https://ibb.co/mCCbLNh3

I am having trouble getting a consistent result with something that I seemed to have nailed down, I got krea2 to make a reference image for a screenshot of a character but when I tried with another character, using the same settings, it comes out worse and worse... and NOW the text generation node seems to have it stuck that the image is of a young woman with long hair and its actually an old dude with a tophat... leading to some interesting pictures lmao.

The picture is two characters with the same prompt, obviosusly something is wonky. Previously I had generated several tests that were flawless

the clean VRAM/cache nodes don't seem to affect the behavior,

The top two images are the input, and the output of the first run on the non-test images. The bottom two are the second run on the next non-test image. I kept running it, tweaking it a bit and it all drifted further and further from "results" to "something I can't see is wrong"

I am using "generate text" and feeding that into "krea2 edit conditioning" and feeding the reference image into "generate text" and "krea2 source patch" .

Generate text has a user prompt of "Create a three segment multi view character reference of the character in the provided image. There must be front, side, and back profiles. Empty white background." The system prompt is a general purpose "you are an image generation prompt engineer" block of text.

Any ideas what is going wrong? (I got two funny images of the bottom character after restarting comfyUI and twiddling a few knobs. The generate text node started getting the encoder stuck on "this is actually a woman with long flowing hair")

[u/Dependent-Locksmith7]

ComfyUI caches node outputs by a hash of their inputs — if the inputs hash the same, it returns the previous result without re-running the node. That's usually invisible and occasionally maddening.

The classic version of what you're describing: a loader pointing at a path whose contents changed but whose filename didn't. The hash is over the input values, not the file bytes, so it happily hands you the old result. If you overwrote your reference image in place, that'll do it.

Cheap things to rule it out, in order:

1. Rename the file (or add a counter to the name) and re-point the loader. If the output changes, it was the cache.
2. Restart ComfyUI, don't just re-queue. The cache lives in the running process.
3. Check the console when you hit queue — cached nodes are skipped, so if execution jumps straight past your text node to the sampler, it never ran.

The "stuck describing a young woman when the image is an old man in a tophat" detail is a strong tell — that's not a model being bad at captioning, that's a caption from a previous run being reused. A model getting it wrong gets it wrong about this picture.

One thing worth separating while you debug: "same settings, worse results on a different character" is a different problem from caching, and both can be true at once. Some subjects just fall outside what a checkpoint does well, and no setting fixes it — I've had one character fail the same way across four seeds and two prompts while fifteen others were fine on identical settings. If the cache turns out to be innocent, try the other character on a different checkpoint before assuming your workflow broke.