MAIster pauses at human decisions declared by the Flow or requested by the live agent session. The Needs-you inbox collects actionable requests across projects.

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Permission request

Inspect the requested action, affected resource, and current Run context. Allow or deny it in the UI. The decision is returned to the same live ACP session. Denial is an explicit result; the agent or Flow must respond to it.

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Saved answer and pending delivery

An answer can be saved before the agent receives it. Answer saved — delivery pending keeps the recorded choice visible and locks new choices. Use Retry delivery when offered: it resends the same saved answer. Refresh after a conflict to see the authoritative choice if another tab or person answered. A pending resume is not a failed decision. A delivery-unavailable error can be retried with the saved answer. Under host event backpressure the answer remains saved until delivery can proceed. If the session ended, the answer was not delivered; let the Run reconcile and use Recover when offered. Recovery may ask the permission again. If the request is no longer pending on a live session, the Run has moved on and the old choice cannot be redelivered. Keep the error code and diagnostic when requesting help. During a long pause MAIster may checkpoint the session and restore it for your answer. MAISTER_PERMISSION_MAX_HOURS is the host’s absolute permission wait cap (default 24 hours); reaching it gracefully parks the session. It does not automatically approve or deny the requested action.

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A question addressed to you before launch

A teammate can ask a task-bound clarification through the librarian before execution. Find it in your Inbox or decisions queue and answer on the task as the named recipient. A blocking question holds launch until resolved; answering supplies context but does not itself launch the task. See clarify before launch.

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Form request

Complete the fields defined by the Flow and submit once the values are correct. MAIster stores the structured response as a Run artifact. Required fields and schema errors are shown before submission.

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Human review

Review the patch and current evidence. Accept the result or request rework with specific comments. Rework comments become input to the next attempt and remain visible in the history.

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Consensus decision

A consensus request distinguishes complete drafts, partial drafts with retained text, and unavailable drafts. Inspect the cause before selecting a partial draft; unavailable choices are disabled. Technical verifier failures are shown separately from substantive disagreements. Bounded excerpts link to available full draft or debate artifacts, subject to your access permissions.

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Manual takeover

Use takeover when a person must finish work directly in the isolated worktree. MAIster preserves Run ownership and workspace identity. After editing, return to the Run, refresh the review context, and satisfy the required checks before promotion.

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Watch a live Run and interrupt a node

The Run page streams the agent transcript of the active node as it works, next to the timeline and the evidence; the liveness pill shows whether the stream is live or reconnecting. When something goes wrong, you do not have to wait for the node to finish. Interrupt node pauses a live agent node mid-turn (agent, judge, and orchestrator nodes; command and check nodes run to completion) and turns the Run into a human-in-the-loop request with four options:
  • Resume as-is — the interrupted turn continues.
  • Restart this node — the node starts again. An optional correction for the agent is appended to the restarted node’s prompt, and the workspace policy decides whether to keep the working tree as it is, rewind it to the node’s checkpoint, or start the node from a fresh tree.
  • Restart from an earlier node — the same restart from a node that has already run in this Run; everything after it becomes stale and runs again.
  • Stop run — the Run ends at this node. The worktree is kept for review, the agent session is closed, and the Run cannot continue from here.
Rewinding or resetting the workspace deletes uncommitted work in the worktree and stopping is final, so MAIster asks for confirmation before those options. Operator restarts do not count against the Flow’s own rework limit; the instance setting MAISTER_MAX_OPERATOR_RESTARTS bounds them per Run. The Run’s Stop action ends a live Run without interrupting a node first: the session is closed and the worktree stays available for review. For a correction that should reach a running scratch dialog without stopping it, see Message a running agent. Node interrupt remains the control for pausing or restarting a Flow node.

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A node paused by the execution host

A host-pressure notice means event delivery has exhausted a host budget. The default action is Resume as-is, and MAIster attempts automatic continuation when the host can accept work again. Stop and restart remain explicit choices. This automatic continuation applies to host-pressure pauses, not to ordinary permission or review requests. See host pauses.

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Safety

Do not edit the parent repository while a Run owns its worktree. Do not approve an action only to clear the inbox. Resolve the underlying decision and verify that later evidence corresponds to the resulting code state.