Show HN: I built a hitman for rogue agents: dead man's switch and spend controls

1 point

3 months ago

I've been building autonomous AI agents and kept running into the same problem: once an agent is deployed, you have no good way to control what it spends, detect when it goes rogue, or kill it remotely.

So I built AgentWallet — a lightweight governance layer you can wrap around any agent that can make HTTP calls.

Core features: - Dead Man's Switch: agent must ping a heartbeat endpoint on an interval. Miss it and it auto-terminates. - Spend controls: set per-transaction and daily limits. Transactions above threshold get blocked or flagged for approval. - Kill switch: one API call terminates all agents instantly. - Audit log: full transaction history per agent. - Cross-agent governance: rules cascade to child agents.

It's open source and free to self-host. It charges per transaction (like Stripe but for agent spending).

npm install @jackd720/agentwallet

Live demo (interactive): agentwallet-v2-sdk.vercel.app GitHub: github.com/JackD720/agentwallet

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or design decisions.