4. Stopping and resuming

A search normally ends on its own, when its budget is spent. You can also stop it early, and a stopped search is not lost: everything it did is in its records, so it can carry on later.

Stopping

hillclimb stop                # the most recent search
hillclimb stop --all          # every running search
hillclimb stop --graceful     # let the attempts in flight finish first

A plain stop ends the search within about a second. The attempts in flight are cut off, their coding agents and verifiers are killed, and those attempts are recorded as abandoned (the tokens they used are not recovered). --graceful starts nothing new and waits for the attempts in flight to finish and be scored, so no work is thrown away.

If an engine does not respond to stop, hillclimb kill ends it by force. The search stays resumable; an attempt that was cut off is recorded as abandoned when it resumes.

Why a search stopped

A search's state says how it ended:

• done: the budget ran out, as planned.
• stopped: you stopped or killed it.
• parked: hillclimb paused it on purpose, for example when the coding agent hit a rate limit or the search reached its cost ceiling.
• crashed: the engine died without saying so, for example when the machine went to sleep.

hillclimb status shows the state, and Data storage lists all of them.

Resuming

hillclimb resume              # the most recent search
hillclimb resume --all        # every stopped, parked or crashed search

A resumed search continues where it stopped, with the settings it started with: the same climber (a copy of it is kept with the search, so editing your files in between changes nothing), the same budget limits, the same agents. The time it already used counts against its budget, so a 30-minute search stopped after 20 minutes has 10 left. A search that is done, or still running, is not resumed.

stop --all and resume --all together are how you pause everything: to update hillclimb, change your environment, or free the machine for a while.