ONE FILE // NOTHING INSTALLED // NO ACCOUNT

GUARD

Work you start on a Grok Bot keeps running after you close the app. That is the feature. The missing half is stopping it without deleting the Bot, and a ceiling it cannot pass while you are asleep.

Why

An owner, on 26 August:

“Overnight: agents ran wild, exhausted the full weekly quota, production site went down.”

“Mobile: no way to monitor or pause agents, only delete.”

Deleting the Bot is not a pause button. This is one.

Use it

sh guard.sh nightly --max-runs 50 --max-minutes 120 -- your-command

Stops at fifty runs, at two hours, or the moment a file appears, whichever comes first.

touch /tmp/grokbot-STOP            # every guarded loop halts
touch /tmp/grokbot-STOP-nightly    # only that one
sh guard.sh --status nightly       # runs so far, minutes, why it ended

The stop signal is a file on purpose. Anything that can touch a path can stop the work: another Bot, one message to a Bot, a file manager on your phone. It needs no process id and it survives the thing it is stopping.

It stops between runs, never in the middle of one, because a half written file is worse than the thing the guard was protecting you from.

The proof, run on a Bot's own computer

Three cases, one machine. The first is the control and it is supposed to misbehave.

No guard: a plain loop told to run 30 times ran 30 times. Nothing short of killing the process could stop it.
Budget of 5: stopped at exactly 5.
Stop file: an endless loop halted one second after the file appeared, with no process left behind.

The full receipt, including every timestamp the machine wrote, is kept as a committed receipt file, and so is the three minute field run.

The file

Copy it, paste it into your Bot, or download it. It uses only what is already on the machine.

guard.sh