Pausing the Agent for Input

What is this?#

useInterrupt lets your agent pause mid-run, hand control to the user through a custom React component, and resume with whatever the user returns. How that pause is implemented depends on the framework's runtime.

Not available on this framework. useInterrupt is only meaningful when the underlying runtime exposes either a native interrupt(...) primitive (LangGraph) or a Promise-resolving frontend tool path (Microsoft Agent Framework). For all other integrations, use useHumanInTheLoop instead — it's the standard hook for tool-call-based pause/resume flows and works on every framework that supports tool calls.

When should I use this?#

Reach for useInterrupt when the pause is a graph-enforced checkpoint where the code path must stop and wait for a human, not an LLM-initiated tool call. Typical cases:

• A sensitive action (payments, irreversible writes) must be approved
• A required piece of state isn't known and can only be collected from the user
• The agent explicitly reaches an approval node in a longer workflow
• You want the server-side contract to be interrupt(...) and resume with a payload

For LLM-initiated pauses where the model decides on the fly to ask the user, prefer useHumanInTheLoop.

Going further#

• Tool-based HITL with useHumanInTheLoop — for LLM-initiated pauses.
• Headless interrupts — compose the lower-level primitives (useAgent, agent.subscribe, copilotkit.runAgent) to resolve interrupts outside a chat surface.