Your AI Agent Doesn't Have an Off Switch. Here's How to Add One.

Your AI Agent Doesn't Have an Off Switch. Here's How to Add One. Every AI coding agent you've used — Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex — reads an AGENTS.md file to understand your project. It tells the agent what to do: which commands to run, which patterns to follow, which files matter. Nobody's telling it when to stop. The problem nobody's documenting AI agents are not traditional software. A web server handles requests within defined parameters. An AI agent decides what to do next — and it does so at machine speed, continuously, across multiple systems simultaneously. An agent with API access can exhaust a $500 budget in minutes. An agent with file access can modify production configs. An agent with email access can send messages to clients. An agent with git access can push to main. These aren't hypothetical risks. They're Tuesday. The safety rules for most AI agent deployments today live in one of three places: Hardcoded in the system prompt — invisible to auditors, lost when th