Pause & Resume

Granular control over task, project, agent, and global dispatch.

AgentDesk provides four levels of pause/resume control, from surgical single-task pauses to a global emergency stop.

Pause Levels

Task Pause

Pause a single task — the dispatcher skips it until resumed.

$ ad-pause task <taskId> <agentId> "Waiting for design review"

This posts a comment on the task explaining why it’s paused. The agent won’t be woken up for this task until a human resumes it.

Project Pause

Pause all dispatch for an entire project.

$ ad-pause project <projectId>

All tasks in the project are skipped. Other projects continue normally.

Agent Pause

Pause a specific agent — it won’t receive any new work.

$ ad-pause agent <agentId>

Useful when an agent is misbehaving or you need to update its configuration.

Global Pause

Emergency stop — pause all agents across all projects.

$ ad-pause all-agents

No agent runs until you explicitly resume.

Resume Commands

$ ad-resume task <taskId>
$ ad-resume project <projectId>
$ ad-resume agent <agentId>
$ ad-resume all-agents

Auto-Pause

The dispatcher uses a stall-level escalation system to handle persistent failures:

  1. 3 consecutive errors → 2-minute stall (level 1) — agent recovers automatically
  2. 1 error after the 2-min stall expires → 10-minute stall (level 2) — the problem is persistent
  3. 1 error after the 10-min stall expires → auto-pause — agent is paused in the database, requires human intervention

After a prior stall, a single error triggers escalation (the agent already had its chance). Any successful turn resets the error counter and stall level to zero. See Proactive Dispatcher for full details.

UI Controls

All pause/resume actions are also available through the web UI:

  • Task detail modal — pause/resume button on each task
  • Project settings — pause/resume the entire project
  • Agent panel — pause/resume individual agents
  • Settings — global dispatcher pause toggle