/ax-audit

No way to interrupt, redirect, or undo agent action

Agent starts a long response or multi-step workflow. User realizes it's wrong but there's no stop, undo, or "go back": they watch it do the wrong thing and can't intervene. Autonomy without exit is coercion.

What goes wrong

User asks the agent to refactor a module. It begins a 12-step migration; at step 3 the user sees it's wrong. No stop button: it runs to completion, leaving the codebase in an unwanted state. Manual revert takes longer than doing it themselves.

Detection

Surfaces: agent-chat, agent-tool-execution

Auditability: hybrid

Static signals:

1. Find agent execution UI (chat panels, action panels, tool execution views).
2. Check for cancel/stop during execution (onCancel, AbortController, useChat().stop, query.interrupt).
3. Trace the signal to the server. stop() aborts the client fetch; the route has to pass req.signal as abortSignal into streamText (or the loop), and each tool's execute has to read it, or the executor finishes every remaining call after Stop.
4. Check for undo/revert after completion. Flag flows with neither.

Concrete commands:

rg -l 'AbortController|onCancel|stopGenerat' --type=ts src/
rg -A 10 'isGenerating|isStreaming|isPending' --type=ts src/ | rg -v 'cancel|stop|abort'
rg -n 'abortSignal|req\.signal|request\.signal' --type=ts src/app/api/ src/server/

Judgment signals:

• A cancel button not wired to AbortController.abort() is a false affordance, worse than nothing.
• A stop() that closes the stream while the server loop keeps executing tools is the same false affordance one layer down: the UI goes quiet and the emails still go out.

False-positive guards:

• Skip // ax-audit-ignore:control-no-escape-hatch, test, and Storybook files.

Fix

During execution: stop button wired to AbortController, and the signal threaded through the route into the loop and each tool. After completion: undo/revert for reversible actions. For irreversible actions, the approval gate (control-no-approval-gate) is the pre-execution escape hatch.

Examples

Anti-pattern (fails):

<div>
  {messages.map((m) => <Message key={m.id} {...m} />)}
  {isGenerating && <Spinner />}
  {/* no stop button, no undo */}
</div>

Applied (passes):

<div>
  {messages.map((m) => <Message key={m.id} {...m} />)}
  {isGenerating && (
    <>
      <Spinner />
      <Button onClick={onStop} aria-label="Stop generating">Stop</Button>
    </>
  )}
  {!isGenerating && <Button onClick={onUndo} variant="ghost">Undo</Button>}
</div>

Default tier and overrides

Defaults to: release-blocker

Suppression

{/* ax-audit-ignore:control-no-escape-hatch, single status check, completes in <1s */}
<StatusCheckResult result={result} />