Interrupt and resume a session

Use these controls when an agent is taking the wrong approach, waiting indefinitely, or needs additional direction. They act on an existing conversation; use Start work on a remote agent to create a new one.

Hermes recovery

Restore the original Hermes gateway, not the Chorus daemon. Interrupt cancels gateway work; Resume requires a server with Hermes continuation-turn support and keeps the original repository. Inspect partial changes before resuming.

Background agents (0.22.0)

Claude daemon wakes wait up to 60 minutes (3600000 ms) after the main turn for background children. CLAUDE_CODE_PRINT_BG_WAIT_CEILING_MS takes precedence over CHORUS_CLAUDE_BG_WAIT_CEILING_MS. This is not a whole-wake timeout. Parents must collect completion or explicitly stop their children before ending the turn. Forced background termination is abnormal even with a raw zero exit code; Chorus attempts to comment on the triggering idea/task without repairing task status or retrying automatically. See daemon timeout settings for zero/empty-value risks, configuration, and diagnostics.

Interrupt active work

1. Open the running conversation.
2. Review the latest output to confirm an interrupt is necessary.
3. Select Interrupt.
4. Wait for the conversation to report that execution has stopped.

A running conversation shows its active turn, elapsed time, and Interrupt control.

Interrupt first asks the agent process to stop gracefully. If it does not stop within the configured timeout, the daemon ends the process.

An interrupt does not undo work

Files, commands, comments, and external actions completed before the interrupt remain in place. Review the partial result before starting another execution.

When a conversation stays running

If the process has finished but the conversation still says Running, select Interrupt in that conversation. The control is available even when no live execution is listed. If Chorus has no live run to stop, it can mark the turn interrupted directly; otherwise it forwards the request to the daemon and waits for the stop report.

Chorus retries reporting that a turn finished after temporary failures, and treats the agent as finished once its process exits, even if a background process it started is still running. None of this limits how long a turn may run, but backend limits still apply: DeepSeek Harness (dsh) defaults to 30 minutes per turn, configurable through CHORUS_DSH_TIMEOUT_MS. Check the final output and any remaining processes before resuming.

Read a failed turn’s diagnostics

From Chorus 0.21.0, a failed startup or execution shows an Agent wake failed summary in its conversation turn, even when the agent produced no reply. Select Show error details when available to inspect captured diagnostic output, exit code, or signal. These diagnostics are saved with the turn and remain available after refreshing or reopening the conversation.

Details are not always available. Older turns or failures without captured diagnostics show a fallback explanation; a user-requested interrupt is not a crash. Use the summary to check the working directory, backend login/model configuration, or credentials, and consult chorus daemon logs if needed. Inspect partial changes before resuming: failure does not undo files or external actions. Diagnostic text can contain sensitive information; redact it before sharing.

Inspect the partial result

Before resuming:

• read the final agent output and error details;
• inspect changed files and any running processes;
• decide whether to continue, provide a corrected instruction, or discard the partial changes using your normal version-control workflow.

Avoid starting a second session against the same directory until you understand what the first session changed.

Resume the conversation

When the conversation is interrupted or recoverable after a crash:

1. Restore the original daemon connection if it is offline.
2. Open the same conversation.
3. Add any correction or missing context.
4. Select Resume.

Resume uses the original agent connection and working directory. It does not migrate the session to another machine or directory. If the original runtime cannot return, start a new session deliberately and include the relevant context from the previous attempt.

For repeated failures, use Troubleshoot agent connections.

Take over from a terminal

You can continue a conversation from your own terminal instead of the in-UI Resume button. Open the conversation and select Copy session ID in the transcript header. This copies the session ID that the agent CLI itself uses to resume, so a manual resume rejoins the same conversation rather than starting a fresh one.

From the working directory the conversation ran in, pass the copied session ID to your backend’s resume command:

• Claude Code — claude --resume <sessionId>
• Codex — codex exec resume <thread_id>
• Kiro — kiro-cli chat --resume-id <sessionId>

Each backend has its own ID format, so the copied value is whatever that backend accepts. See your platform’s reference page for the exact command: Claude Code, Codex, and Kiro.

Chorus keeps one session per idea. If you start work on the idea from a different working directory, Chorus moves that single session there instead of starting a new one — so there is always exactly one conversation to take over, wherever it last ran. See the Online agents overview for the full model.