Hold Person

Hold Person

Freeze a process, account, or workflow in place with administrative authority.

What This Skill Does

Hold Person = hard freeze. Nothing moves. In-flight operations stop. Requires authority. Used for security incidents, fraud, compliance holds, misbehaving systems. Sleep = graceful suspension. State is preserved and queued. Operations resume automatically. Used for maintenance windows, temporary pauses, planned downtime. In this grimoire, Hold Person is treated as a hybrid spell with a prototype delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Hold Person (spell).

When To Use

• Activate Hold Person when the user needs to hard-freeze an account, process, workflow, or system pending investigation, review, or resolution, with these conditions:
• Something must stop immediately and completely — no partial operation
• The frozen state must be preserved intact (not deleted, not terminated)
• The freeze is temporary and reversible — release conditions matter
• Administrative authority is required — someone must be authorized to impose and lift the hold
• The freeze is targeted — specific accounts, pipelines, endpoints, or jobs, not mass org-wide changes

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. Verify authority: Who can impose this hold? Is the requester authorized? Document the authorization chain. If authority is unclear, flag it before proceeding.
3. Define freeze scope: What exactly stops? What continues? What happens to in-flight operations? Be specific: which accounts, which pipelines, which endpoints. Preserve all state — nothing is deleted.
4. Set release conditions: Who can unfreeze? Under what circumstances? What audit trail is required? What happens if the hold exceeds a time threshold (e.g., auto-escalate after 48 hours)? A hold without release criteria is a permanent lockout — that's a different and more dangerous action.
5. Deliver the hold plan: Provide the hold specification (what is frozen, by whose authority, under what conditions) and release procedures (how to unfreeze, who authorizes it, what audit trail is required).
6. Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.

Deliverables

• Hold specification: frozen scope, authority chain, conditions
• Release procedures: unfreeze steps, authorization requirements, audit trail
• Guardrails: never impose without authority, always define release conditions, preserve state

Pitfalls / Guardrails

• Call out the glue, permissions, or missing infrastructure before you imply this is fully operational.
• Do NOT use Hold Person for:
• Do not use for: Graceful pause with queuing (use Sleep): "pause during maintenance", "queue and deliver later", "no state lost"
• Do not use for: OS-level process control (use Stun): "SIGSTOP/SIGCONT", "stun for diagnostic", "quick memory check"
• Do not use for: Mass/organization-wide freezes: "all 500 users", "entire role", "every account"
• Do not use for: Permanent termination or deletion: "revoke permanently", "delete access", "shut down for good"
• Do not use for: Simple scheduling delays: "run two hours later", "shift the cron", "delay until upstream is ready"
• Do not use for: Stop restarting without preservation: "just stop the restart loop", "keep it down until I say"

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-person design an administrative hold for this [account/process/workflow] with proper authorization and release conditions

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.