STATE AND CONTROL FLOW

PAUSE AND RESUME Pause means the harness deliberately stops the loop and holds everything steady. Resume means it later starts the loop again exactly where it left off. Pauses happen for several reasons. A person might need to approve something. A rate limit from an outside service might say "wait one minute." The system might be shutting down for maintenance. Or a job might simply be waiting hours for a slow external event. The most important pause type for safety is the human-in-the-loop stop. Human-in-the-loop means a person is placed inside the process at chosen points to review or approve what the agent wants to do. A human-in-the-loop pause works like a bank teller calling over a manager before a very large withdrawal. The harness saves state, shows the reviewer what is about to happen, and does nothing further until the reviewer responds. A good approval screen gives the reviewer only what they need to decide quickly: what action, with what inputs, what the agent's reason was, what will be affected, and whether the action can be undone. Good design also plans for the reviewer never responding. A timeout rule must say what to do. For risky actions the safe default is usually to cancel or to leave the task waiting and notify someone, rather than quietly proceeding. Resuming must also be designed carefully. By the time a human approves, the world may have changed. A resumed agent should recheck assumptions that could have become stale, for example confirming the target file still exists.