How to Add a Kill Switch to Your AI Agent in 5 Minutes

Your AI agent is running in production. It's calling APIs, making decisions, spending money. And right now, if it goes sideways — stuck in a loop, hallucinating tool calls, burning through your API budget — your only option is to manually kill the process and hope nothing broke. This tutorial adds a real kill switch. Five minutes, no code changes to your agent. What we're building A reverse proxy that sits between your agent and the LLM provider. Every request flows through it. You define policies in YAML — and when a policy triggers, the request gets blocked before it ever reaches the model. By the end of this tutorial, your agent will automatically shut down if it: Exceeds a token budget Makes too many requests in a time window (loop detection) Tries to call a restricted tool Hits a risk threshold you define Prerequisites Docker and Docker Compose installed An OpenAI API key (or any OpenAI-compatible provider) An AI agent that uses the OpenAI API format Step 1: Clone and start the st