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Available in Piebald Pro With Piebald, you can pause the agentic loop in a chat. This is a unique feature that may seem unintuitive at first. Traditionally, the only way you can stop an agent is by interrupting it. If it’s generating text, there will be a partial response which will have to be regenerated, wasting time, tokens, and context space. If it’s executing a tool call, the subprocess will be killed and the system may be left in an inconsistent state (files partially modified, temporary files not cleaned up, handles corrupted, etc.). Piebald takes advantage of the agentic loop to enable graceful pausing of the chat without interrupting.

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The agentic loop

The “agentic loop” is the underlying mechanism that enables AI agents to work autonomously. A conversation is a list of messages starting with the first user message; that context is sent to an AI provider and a response is generated and appended to the conversation. If the response contains tool calls, they get executed—possibly waiting while the interface allows the user to approve or deny them—and their output is appended to the conversation context, and a second response is generated. This cycle of context update → regenerate fully encapsulates the entire agentic loop and is what makes modern agentic development possible.

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Pausing the loop

In order to provide graceful pausing, Piebald hooks into the agentic loop; we simply break the loop and skip auto-approval if the chat is paused. This allows you to temporarily and cleanly stop the agent—for example, if the model has done its research and planning but your working directory isn’t ready yet—without wasting time or tokens. Pausing has another benefit as well. When the loop is paused, no tool calls are automatically approved, so you can intercept tools that would normally be auto-approved and edit or deny them instead. Here’s an example of a read-only tool (ls -la) which would normally be auto-approved, but, since the chat is paused, is left waiting for manual handling: Screenshot of `ls -la` not being auto-approved because the chat has been paused.

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Resuming the loop after pausing

Resuming the loop simply picks it up where it left off; auto-approving any elligible pending tool calls, starting a new generation, and repeating. The result will be exactly the same as if you had let the agent continue without pausing. Pausing the agentic loop requires Piebald Pro.