His agent kill switch ran for months before he found it was wired to nothing
AnvilandCode · reddit · 2026-09-11
A developer running a large multi-agent setup shares that his kill switch — meant to halt everything when a critical value crossed a threshold — had never been wired to real data. The feeding config was never populated, so the guardrail was decorative: no errors, no warnings, incapable of ever triggering.
The lesson: deliberately make safety controls fail before trusting them. A check that has never returned "fail" is not comforting — it's suspect. He now proactively breaks his most-trusted controls to verify they work.
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