freeze

A command that activates a project kill switch by writing a reason and timestamp to .rea/HALT. Governed tool calls then stop until the project is unfrozen.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when an agent behaves unexpectedly, a hook misbehaves, you are handing off a session, or you need to pause governed operations.
Why use it?
It provides a quick way to stop unexpected or unattended agent activity while a problem is investigated.

Command for Claude Code

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/bookedsolidtech/helixir/freeze
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bookedsolidtech/helixir

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session 24 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 740 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00024 $0.00740
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00370
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00148
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00074

Measured 2d ago against content hash c5297513139f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

freeze scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/commands/freeze.md · 83 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/freeze — Activate the Kill Switch

Writes .rea/HALT with a timestamped reason. Once frozen, every REA-governed tool call (native MCP, proxied downstream, and hook-gated) refuses to execute until npx rea unfreeze is run.

Use this when:

  • You see the agent doing something unexpected and you want to stop it immediately
  • You are handing the session off and want to be sure nothing runs unattended
  • A hook or middleware is misbehaving and you need to isolate the problem
  • You are about to do something outside the normal governance envelope and want an obvious tripwire

Arguments

  • $ARGUMENTS (required) — a short reason (one sentence). If empty, prompt the user for one before proceeding. Never freeze without a reason.

Preflight

  1. Read .rea/policy.yaml — confirm REA is installed. If missing, report "REA not initialized" and stop.
  2. Check whether .rea/HALT already exists. If it does, show the existing reason and ask whether to overwrite.

Step 1 — Validate the reason

  • If $ARGUMENTS is empty or whitespace, prompt: "Reason is required. Describe why you are freezing this session."
  • If the reason is a placeholder like "test", "asdf", or "freeze", confirm with the user — the reason ends up in the audit log and should be meaningful.

Step 2 — Invoke the freeze CLI

npx rea freeze --reason "$ARGUMENTS"

This command:

  1. Writes .rea/HALT with a JSON payload: { reason, timestamp, invoker: "slash-command" }
  2. Appends an entry to .rea/audit.jsonl
  3. Returns exit code 0 on success, non-zero on failure

Step 3 — Confirm

Print the confirmation plainly:

REA session FROZEN
  Reason:    <reason>
  Timestamp: <ISO-8601>
  HALT file: .rea/HALT

All governed tool calls are now blocked. To resume: npx rea unfreeze

Behavior under HALT

Once .rea/HALT is present:

  • Every hook checks hooks/_lib/halt-check.sh at its top and exits non-zero (blocked)
  • Every middleware invocation checks kill-switch first and refuses
  • Slash commands that take actions (not read-only status commands) report FROZEN and refuse to proceed
  • /rea continues to work — it is read-only and needs to be able to report the frozen state

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 83 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A c5297513139f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

freeze is a command published in the GitHub repository bookedsolidtech/helixir (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 740 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.