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
- Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
- Assess the emergency: what is happening, how fast, and what is the blast radius if unchecked?
- Determine the freeze scope: what can be stopped safely vs. what must keep running even in an emergency.
- Activate the circuit breaker with explicit logging and notification.
- Define the recovery plan: how to restore service safely after the emergency is resolved.
- 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