Exceeding the iteration budget ends the run, it does not pause it

What it means

Reaching the configured maximum is allowed; only going past it ends the run. A caller who sets the budget expecting the last permitted iteration to still happen is right — the guard only trips on the update that would push the count strictly beyond the maximum.

Where it does trip, the run does not pause. Nothing about the verdict looks like the pause a run takes to wait on an interrupt or a deferred step: no resume handle is offered, and the status reported is never paused. The response carries no partial results, only the terminal status together with the maximum that was configured, the count actually reached, and which node's update reached it.

Example

A run configured with a maximum of 5, whose current node pushes the count to 999:

{
  "status": "max_iterations_exceeded",
  "results": [],
  "metadata": { "max_iterations": 5, "current_iterations": 999, "node_id": "loop_node" }
}