Interrupt mid-turn
You don't hand an agent the keys and hope. Warden gives you the levers to stop a running turn, refuse a single tool, cap the spend, and pick up cleanly after a crash.
The nervous part of running a coding agent is the moment after you hit enter, when it starts doing things and you are just watching. Warden is built so that moment stays yours. Here are the levers.
Stop a turn in flight
Press Ctrl+C while a turn is running and it stops, cleanly. You don’t have to kill the process or wait for a long, wrong plan to play all the way out. The interrupt is a first-class part of the loop, not a crash, and the session is still there when you take back over.
Refuse one thing without refusing everything
When the agent reaches for a tool that can change your machine, Warden asks. You can allow it once, allow it for the rest of the session, or deny it, right there, without restarting. Permission modes set the baseline: a read-only planning mode that blocks every write, a mode that auto-accepts edits, and others in between. You decide how much rope the agent gets, and you can tighten it any time.
Put a ceiling on the cost
Set a per-session spending cap and Warden holds it. You get a warning as you approach the limit and a hard stop at it, so a runaway loop can’t quietly burn through your budget. The running total is on screen the whole time, and the cap survives a resume, so continuing yesterday’s work doesn’t reset the meter.
Spend thinking where it’s worth it
Reasoning effort is a dial you control, from off to maximum. Turn it up for the hard problem, down for the mechanical one. The current setting is always visible, and it counts toward the same cost meter, so “think harder” is an explicit, priced choice rather than a hidden default.
Pick up after a crash
If a session dies mid-turn, Warden notices what state it was in and resumes from there instead of guessing or starting over. The work you already paid for is not lost.
The point
None of this is about distrust. It is about staying the operator. You can let an agent move fast and still stop it, steer it, and cap it at any second. That is the difference between running an agent and being run by one.
Warden is MIT-licensed. It pairs with TheAuditor for code facts and Arbiter to orchestrate long jobs across providers.
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