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microagent kill

Last updated: 2026-08-15

microagent kill <name> --reason <text> [--yes] [--state-dir <dir>]

kill is the hard variant of halt. Use it when a graceful halt doesn’t return within its graceful window; halt never escalates on its own. For a clean shutdown of a healthy workspace you intend to start again, use halt (or its stop alias) instead. The disk state survives kill, but nothing inside the guest gets a chance to flush or exit cleanly.

Terminal presentation follows the delayed lifecycle progress behavior described for halt. A quick force-termination remains quiet, and structured output contains no presentation text.

Because it discards volatile runtime state, kill requires an audit reason and asks for confirmation when the workspace is live. Use --yes only after the caller has made that decision through another interaction or authorization step. halt remains immediate and does not require confirmation.

Force-terminate a workspace after confirming the prompt:

Terminal window
microagent kill research --reason "guest did not halt"

--state-dir matters only when the workspace lives outside the default ~/.microagent/.

Flag Description
--name <name> Workspace name; positional name is also accepted
--id <id> Workspace ID alias for --name
--reason <text> Opaque reason recorded as the lifecycle event’s purpose
--yes, -y Confirm without prompting; intended for deliberate automation
--state-dir <dir> State directory holding the workspace record (default ~/.microagent/)
--backend <name> Backend identity override
--supervisor <path> Override the installed host backend supervisor path

See global flags for --output/--json/--supervisor.

kill exits 0 on success; nonzero when the workspace cannot be found or the VM process cannot be terminated.

  • halt - the graceful variant (park a healthy workspace cleanly; stop is an alias)
  • delete - remove the workspace afterwards