pause

A pause command that saves the session’s important knowledge and state so work can continue later. It can also shut down teammates after the information has been preserved.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to pause an active coding session, record handoff information, synchronize documentation, and prepare the session for later resumption.
Why use it?
It prevents useful context from being lost when work stops temporarily, such as at the end of the day or while a pull request is still unfinished.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/synaptic-labs-ai/pact-plugin/pause
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Synaptic-Labs-AI/PACT-Plugin
Per session 13 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,670 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00013 $0.01670
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.00835
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00334
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00167

Measured 2d ago against content hash 73e774164342, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pause scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

pact-plugin/commands/pause.md · 131 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 131 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PACT Pause Protocol

Pause the current session for later resumption. This is a memory-critical subset of wrap-up — it consolidates knowledge and persists session state without cleaning up the worktree or deleting tasks.

Cross-reference: For full end-of-session cleanup (worktree removal, task audit, session decision), see wrap-up.md. Pause is invoked automatically when the user chooses "Pause work for now" in /PACT:peer-review, /PACT:comPACT, or /PACT:wrap-up.


When to Use

  • PR is open but not ready to merge
  • User wants to pause work and resume later (same or different session)
  • End of day / context switch — preserve knowledge before teammates shut down

Steps

CRITICAL: Steps 1-3 (consolidation) MUST complete BEFORE step 6 (teammate shutdown). The secretary needs to be alive to process HANDOFFs.

1. Memory Consolidation (Pass 2)

TaskCreate(subject="secretary: session consolidation (Pass 2)",
  description="Run Consolidation Harvest for team {team_name}. Follow the Consolidation Harvest workflow in your pact-handoff-harvest skill. Report summary when done.")
TaskUpdate(taskId, owner="secretary")

2. Documentation Sync

Run /PACT:pin-memory (no arguments): Reviews the session for pin-worthy context, pins what matters, and prunes stale entries.

3. Orchestration Retrospective

Delegate calibration data save to the secretary:

TaskCreate(subject="secretary: save orchestration retrospective",
  description="Save orchestration calibration: context='Orchestration retrospective for {feature}', goal='Calibrate orchestration judgment via second-order observation', decisions=[variety accuracy, specialist fit, phase efficiency], entities=['orchestration_calibration', '{domain}']. Report summary when done.")
TaskUpdate(taskId, owner="secretary")

Skip when: Session was trivial (single comPACT, no variety assessment performed).

4. Task Status Report

Report task summary without deleting any tasks:

Read the full file on GitHub · 131 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 131 lines · 13 tokens per session scan A 73e774164342

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pause is a command published in the GitHub repository Synaptic-Labs-AI/PACT-Plugin (71 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 13 tokens to every session and 1,670 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.