Continue where you left off: what did you already finish from the last request?
That is the request you need in nine out of ten cases where the assistant seems to stall. You reopen the chat under Earlier chats, send that line, and the assistant tells you itself how far it got. The assistant remembers a chat on the server side, not in your browser tab. So you can close the tab, shut your laptop and continue later.
This article walks through the four situations you actually run into, in the order you should rule them out.
1. It is simply still working
A request that builds a complete theme or installs WordPress takes minutes, not seconds. As long as the status line keeps moving and the reading steps keep coming, nothing is wrong. What is true: on a huge change, such as a WordPress install with hundreds of files, you do not get a full line-by-line list but only the file list. That is on purpose; otherwise the display chokes on its own size.
Sitting tight is the right answer here. If you do want to break it off, you can: use Stop next to the input bar, or Stop session in the ⋯ menu. That last one only appears when a session is really running, so it doubles as a way to check whether anything is still going.
2. "Waiting for your approval"
If it says "Waiting for your approval ↑", the assistant is not stuck but waiting for you. Scroll up and you will find a card with the proposed change and the buttons to allow or refuse. This mostly happens when you scrolled away halfway through a long task and the card left your view.
If you do not want this every time, put the assistant in auto mode. It then judges for itself whether a step is safe and only asks when in doubt. Restoring a backup always asks permission, even in auto mode.
3. "The session was interrupted"
If you see "The session was interrupted (for example by a server update). Pick the chat under Earlier chats to continue.", the back end fell away while your chat still exists. That happens because of server maintenance, a restart, or a dropped connection between the chat and the service that runs the assistant.
What you do:
- Click Earlier chats and pick the chat you were just in.
- You get the message "Chat resumed. The assistant still knows what was discussed."
- Send the line at the top of this article and let it tell you where it got to.
The assistant then has all the context from before. What it does not have is the half-finished work in its head: a task that stopped halfway stopped halfway. Hence that first question.
A variant of this is the message "Your Claude login has expired. Connect again and then continue under Earlier chats." In that case the session is not the problem, your connection is. Go to the Claude tab in Invoker Link, connect again, and pick the chat back up after that.
One more reason a session sometimes refuses to start: if you change the assistant's skills while a session is running, that change is held back until the session is done. Stop the session or wait it out, then try again.
4. The chat hangs while the work is already done
This is the most annoying variant and it is real. During the first episode of Built in an hour the chat sat on "Running a command" for 25 minutes after a WordPress install, while that install had finished after just over three minutes. The work was done, the message never arrived.
How to spot it: open your website in a second tab. If the site is simply there, the work is finished and only the display is hanging.
What you do then: Stop session in the ⋯ menu, then resume the chat under Earlier chats and ask what was done. You lose nothing; all the files are already in place.
Rolling a task back
Every task gets its own snapshot before anything changes. Under the task card sits the Undo button; it asks "Roll back all changes from this task?" and then puts the files back the way they were. That works with Claude and with Codex, and also for changes applied in auto mode without your intervention.
Important: undo is about files. It does not roll back a database change or a sent email. For that you need a backup; ask the assistant for last night's backups and see Restoring a backup.
Starting over cleanly
If a chat gets thoroughly tangled, for example because the assistant keeps returning to an approach that does not work, start with New chat. That does not throw the old chat away, it stays under Earlier chats.
A new chat does read the notes about the website. So first put in the notes panel what is true by now and what should not happen. Then the next session does not start from zero, and not from wrong assumptions either.
Common mistakes
"I refreshed the page and thought the chat was gone." Refreshing does not break the chat. Just pick it again under Earlier chats.
"I sent the same request again while the first one was still running." That gets you the same work twice, sometimes tangled together. First check whether Stop session exists in the ⋯ menu; if it is there, something is still running.
"I undid the wrong task." Undo works per task, so check from the top down. If you undo one too many, ask the assistant to redo the change; it knows from the chat what was there.
"I waited an hour and nothing happened." Then it was not a long task but a hanging display. Check your site in a second tab, stop the session and resume the chat. If it keeps happening, use Ask Invoker for help in the ⋯ menu: that sends us your account, the website, the connection status and the log lines, with a copy to yourself.