Hold Monster

Hold Monster

Freeze a large-scale system or service as an emergency circuit breaker.

What This Skill Does

Hold Monster is Hold Person scaled to larger targets. The real-world version is the emergency circuit breaker: halting an entire service, freezing a deployment pipeline, or stopping a runaway process at the infrastructure level. This is the big red button — it stops everything, and it should only be pressed when the alternative is worse. In this grimoire, Hold Monster is treated as a hybrid spell with a prototype delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Hold Monster (spell).

When To Use

• A system-wide emergency requires an immediate halt: runaway costs, cascading failures, or data integrity threats.
• You need to design a circuit breaker or emergency stop mechanism for a large-scale system.

Prerequisites

• No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.

Procedure

1. Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
2. Assess the emergency: what is happening, how fast, and what is the blast radius if unchecked?
3. Determine the freeze scope: what can be stopped safely vs. what must keep running even in an emergency.
4. Activate the circuit breaker with explicit logging and notification.
5. Define the recovery plan: how to restore service safely after the emergency is resolved.
6. Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.

Deliverables

• A circuit breaker specification: what stops, what stays running, and what triggers the halt.
• A recovery plan: step-by-step restoration procedure after the emergency.

Pitfalls / Guardrails

• Call out the glue, permissions, or missing infrastructure before you imply this is fully operational.
• Circuit breakers are for genuine emergencies. Do not use system-wide halts for problems that can be solved with targeted intervention.
• Every circuit breaker must have a recovery plan. Stopping a system without knowing how to restart it is not safety — it is a different kind of failure.

Verification

• Check that the result includes every deliverable promised above.
• Check that confirmed facts, assumptions, and inferences are visibly separated.
• Check which parts are concrete actions versus framing, so the user can tell what is real now.
• Check that any missing glue code, permissions, or future work is labeled before the skill is treated as ready.

Example Invocation

/hold-monster design an emergency circuit breaker for this [system/service/pipeline] with freeze scope and recovery plan

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: Hmbown
• Source: Hmbown/Wizards-of-the-Ghosts
• License: CC0-1.0

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.