The preview of the render layers node is set to off in the default node tree. The reasoning is: - It is common to start compositing without rendering, so this will give a cleaner look for a first impression. - Previews in general are not working well (currently the preview won't compute if the node is disconnected, sometimes the preview is shown with an empty image, etc..). Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/144173