# The agent kill-switch drill: stop it, prove it stopped, list what it did

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Most teams can show you a "disable" button. Few have timed what happens after someone presses it. Run this drill on one agent in a non-production environment first, then in production during a quiet window with the owner present. It takes about 45 minutes.

## Before you start (write these down)
| Item | Example | Yours |
|---|---|---|
| Agent and environment | claims-triage-agent, staging | |
| Who may pull the switch (a role on call, not only the builder) | on-call platform engineer | |
| Who may restart it (a named approver, different from the person who stopped it) | head of claims operations | |
| Target time from "stop" to last action | set by the owner before the drill | |
| Where the action record lives | gateway log, audit table | |

Start a timer when the stop decision is made. Write down the timestamp `T0`.

## The five steps

### 1. Stop new actions
How: revoke or disable the agent's credentials, or block it at the gateway. Do not rely on the agent's own code to stop itself.
Probe: send one tool call as the agent after the stop.
Pass = the call is denied, and the denial is logged with the agent's identity and the time.

### 2. Stop work already in flight
How: drain or cancel queued jobs, scheduled runs and automatic retries.
Probe: two minutes after `T0`, query for any action by this agent with a timestamp after `T0`.
Pass = zero actions after `T0`. A retry that fires after the stop is a fail.

### 3. List everything it did
How: pull every write action (create, update, send, pay, delete) by this agent in the window you care about, for example the last 24 hours.
Probe: time how long it takes to produce the list, with the system changed, the record ID, and the before and after value.
Pass = a complete list in under 10 minutes, without asking the developer to grep logs by hand.

### 4. Decide what to undo
How: for each write on the list, mark one of: keep, roll back automatically, hand to a named person to fix.
Probe: pick two writes and actually reverse them in the test environment.
Pass = each write has a rollback path or a named human owner. "We would figure it out" is a fail.

### 5. Restart under approval
How: the named approver reviews steps 1 to 4 and signs off before credentials are restored.
Probe: try to restart without the approval.
Pass = restart is blocked until the approval is recorded.

## Score it
| Measure | Your result |
|---|---|
| Time from `T0` to the last action by the agent | |
| Actions after `T0` (target: 0) | |
| Minutes to produce the full write list | |
| Writes with no rollback path and no owner | |
| Restart blocked without approval (yes / no) | |

Rule of thumb: if any action happened after `T0`, or any write has neither a rollback nor an owner, the agent is not ready for more autonomy, whatever its accuracy is.

## After the drill
- Fix the first failure you found, then rerun the drill. Do not fix everything at once.
- Repeat on a schedule (for example quarterly) and after any change to the agent's tools or credentials.
- Keep the scored sheet. It is the evidence that the stop works, not just that the button exists.

Humans stay in control: a person on call decides to stop, a different named person approves the restart.