chris-mcnulty Kill Switches
A kill switch is a condition that, when active, stops an agent from acting. They are not warnings. They are not soft signals. They are hard stops.
Files in this skill
triggers.md— the exact triggers and their effects. Read at the top of every agent loop and immediately before every send.
The rule
Every agent — Prospector, Composer, Cadence — calls into this skill before doing any work, and again before any send. If any trigger is active, the agent reports it, logs to the prospect MD file (or to a global log), and exits cleanly.
Why this is its own skill, not inside compliance
Compliance checks gate content (banned phrases, suppression, CAN-SPAM). Kill switches gate behavior (campaign auto-pause, per-rep send caps, the global pause flag, error-rate thresholds). They look similar but apply at different points: compliance is per-draft, kill switches are per-tick.
Keeping them separate makes it harder to accidentally remove a kill switch when editing compliance, and easier to add new ones without touching compliance.
Authoring new kill switches
A new trigger goes into triggers.md. Every agent already imports this skill, so once the trigger is in the file, all three agents check it.