Kill switch
Use the Pushary kill switch to stop a runaway AI agent from your phone or the dashboard. Every tool call in that session is denied for one hour.
The kill switch stops one agent session, or all of them, in the middle of a run. You tap Stop in the Pushary phone app, on a question's web page, or in the dashboard. From then on the agent's hook denies every tool call that session tries, including calls your policy would auto-approve. The stop clears on its own after one hour.
Stop an agent
From the phone app
Open the session and tap Stop, then confirm Stop this agent?. To halt every session at once, open the Fleet tab and tap Stop all agents. If the agent's machine can be reached, the app also ends the agent's process.
From a question in your browser
When an agent asks you something, the question's web page shows Stop this agent under the question. Tap it to halt that session and dismiss the question. No laptop needed.
From the dashboard
Open Dashboard > Agent at pushary.com/dashboard/agent, find the session in the blocked queue, and click Stop. The dashboard says "Stopped. The agent's next tool call will be denied."
The agent's next tool call fails with this reason:
Stopped by user, this agent was halted from PusharyWhich plans can stop an agent
Every plan can stop an agent, from the dashboard, the phone app or a question's web page. Read-only teammates cannot stop an agent.
What a stop does
- Denies every tool call in that session. Each call checks the kill switch first, in every approval mode and every Claude Code permission mode, including plan and auto.
- Cancels the session's open questions, so a stale approval does not linger on your phone.
- Ends the process when it can. From the phone app, Pushary asks the machine to end the agent's process. That needs the machine online, a CLI new enough to do it, and a session that reported its process id. Otherwise the agent is only blocked, and it keeps running and spending tokens until you stop it from your terminal.
- Leaves other sessions alone. A stop is scoped to one session id, so your other agents keep working. Stop all agents is the site-wide version and halts every session.
- Writes an audit entry. A stop from the dashboard or a question's web page is recorded as Agent stopped in your audit log.
How the kill switch works
The stop is a small marker in Redis, keyed by your site and the session id. The hook checks it on every tool call, before anything else:
tool call → stopped? deny
→ deny rule? deny
→ outside an agreed scope? ask you
→ your policy allow, ask your phone, or the agent's promptBecause the stop is checked before the auto-approve shortcut, a stopped session is denied even for tools you always allow.
When does the stop end?
A stop expires one hour after you set it, so a forgotten stop never blocks a session for good. To get going sooner, start a new agent session: a new session has a new id, so a single-session stop does not apply to it. After Stop all agents, every session on the site stays stopped until the hour is up.
Pushary for Mac shows Undo after you stop a session from the notch. Undo lifts only the stop you just made. It is not offered when the session was already stopped from somewhere else, or when Pushary asked the machine to end the process, because a process cannot be started again. If another person stops the same session, or Stop all agents is on, Undo says the stop is still in force. Two stops on one session last as long as the longer of the two.
The kill switch fails open
The hook reads the stop on every tool call, with a 3 second timeout. If it cannot reach Pushary, it keeps using a stop it saw in the last 60 seconds. After that it cannot know, so it auto-approves nothing except read-only commands it knows are safe, and hands other calls to the agent's own prompt. The kill switch is a remote control, not a sandbox. For a block that holds offline, add a deny rule to your policy: the hook keeps a cached copy of your policy for up to 12 hours.
Next steps
Find the blocked agent
The control panel shows every running session and which one is waiting on you.
Block a command for good
A permission policy with an auto-deny rule refuses a tool or command for every agent.