Kill Switch
Halt a runaway agent from your phone — deny every tool call until you release it
The kill switch lets you stop a single agent session mid-run from the dashboard or straight from the push notification on your lock screen. Once set, the PreToolUse hook denies every tool that session tries to run until you release it.
Pro feature
Stopping an agent from the dashboard requires the Agent Pro or Team plan. The stop control on the lock-screen decision page works via a signed link and is available wherever you received the push.
How it works
The kill flag is a small per-session marker in Redis. The hook reads it first, before anything else:
PreToolUse → check kill flag → (killed?) deny
→ check auto-approve shortcut
→ resolve policy → allow / ask / pushBecause the check runs before the auto-approve shortcut, a halted session is denied even for tools you've always-allowed. The agent sees the denial reason "Stopped by user — this agent was halted from Pushary" on every subsequent call.
The kill flag is scoped to one sessionId, so stopping a runaway session does not affect your other agents running in parallel. There's also a site-wide variant that halts every session at once.
Stopping an agent
From the lock screen
When an agent pushes you an approval, the decision page has a Stop action. Tap it to halt that session immediately — no need to open your laptop.
From the dashboard
Open Dashboard → Agent, find the session in the Blocked Queue, and hit Stop. The stop is recorded in your audit trail.
Release it when you're ready
Use Release (dashboard) to clear the flag. The session's next tool call then proceeds through normal policy resolution again.
Auto-expiry
A kill flag auto-expires after 1 hour by default (configurable up to 24 hours) so a forgotten stop never permanently bricks a session. Releasing it manually clears it immediately.
The kill switch fails open. If the hook can't reach Pushary (network down), it can't read the flag, so it falls back to terminal approval rather than blocking. A truly offline agent can't reach your phone anyway — but it means the kill switch is a control plane, not an airtight sandbox. For hard guarantees, deny the tool in your policy.