How to Stop Work in Insulin: Replies, Goals, Jobs and Inbox

To stop work in Insulin, use the control that belongs to the surface doing the work: Stop for a reply that is still being written, Cancel goal for a goal, Terminate or Disable for a job, and a rule, trigger or mailbox switch for Inbox. Reloading the page is not a stop, and the monthly spending limit is a last-resort brake on the whole organization.

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Something in your workspace is doing the wrong thing: a reply heading somewhere it shouldn’t, a goal grinding through rounds you no longer want, a scheduled job firing with the wrong instructions, or an Inbox rule drafting to the wrong people. You need to stop it now, and whoever is running the incident needs to know whether they can stop it when it isn’t theirs.

Insulin answers both surface by surface. This post maps the controls for chat replies, goals, jobs and Inbox, then the monthly spending limit, which stops far more than the one thing that went wrong. Approvals are a separate subject, covered in where Insulin’s approval gate is armed.

Which control stops which kind of work?

Each surface has its own control, and the table says what to press, where it is, what it ends and who can use it. The sections after it cover only the exceptions and what to check afterwards.

Work	Control, and where it is	What it does	Who can use it
A reply still being written	Stop, in the composer	Cancels the turn immediately	You, from your composer
A goal	Cancel goal in the goal card’s drawer, or Stop., Cancel, pause or drop it written in the conversation	Ends the goal’s work	You; in a channel, anyone who can send messages there
A conversation, reply included	/clear, typed in the composer	Asks the agent to stop the reply, then deletes the conversation and its messages	You, in a one-on-one chat or a personal channel; not in an organization channel
A manual job’s run	Terminate, on the job’s detail page	Stops the run that is going; it is recorded as Cancelled	The job’s owner only
A cron or push job	Enable / Disable, on the job’s detail page	Pauses the job without deleting it, so it won’t fire on its own	The job’s owner only
Any job	Delete, on the job’s detail page	Permanently removes the job and its run history, after you confirm by name	The job’s owner only
One Inbox rule	Its enable switch, in Inbox Settings → Rules	Turns the rule off, which always works	You, in your Inbox
Every rule on one CRM trigger	Disable on the trigger’s row, in Inbox Settings → Account → Triggers	The rules stay saved and go dormant	You, in your Inbox
All of Inbox	Disable on the mailbox card, in Inbox Settings → Account	Stops receiving and processing new email; processed mail is kept	You, in your Inbox

Leaving the page is not on the list, and the next section explains why.

What happens to a reply when you reload or leave?

It depends on where you are: in a one-on-one chat the reply carries on unless you stay away, in an organization channel your turn stops at once, and a goal keeps running either way. Pressing Stop is different from leaving, because Stop cancels the turn immediately. If you reload the page or your connection drops while an agent is still writing:

Where you are	What happens
A one-on-one chat or a personal channel	Insulin waits 30 seconds after it notices you’ve gone, then checks whether the conversation is open again, in the reloaded page or any other tab. If it is, the reply carries on, and in a one-on-one chat you get the Stop button back for it. If it isn’t, the turn is cancelled
An organization channel	A dropped connection stops your turn at once
A goal, anywhere	It keeps running

So a hurried reload ends nothing in a one-on-one chat: the reply carries on, and Stop comes back for it. Press it.

/clear asks the agent to stop the reply, then deletes the conversation. The old conversation is not kept, so use it only when you want the conversation gone too; after a reply has gone wrong, you usually want the transcript.

Once the reply has stopped, check what it did first: each tool call shows as Running, Success or Error and expands to show its inputs and outputs. If a reply stopped and nobody pressed anything, that is a different question, and diagnosing a reply that stopped on its own covers it.

What ends a goal, and what doesn’t?

Cancel goal and the plain-English words end it; leaving doesn’t. A goal is a stretch of work an agent pursues across many rounds, tracked by a goal card that is persisted with the thread: close the window, come back later, and the goal is still there with the progress it made in the meantime.

Three details matter in an incident:

• Writing pause ends it. Stop., Cancel, pause and drop it, written in the conversation, all end the work the same way the button does.
• Steering is the alternative to stopping. If the goal is right but its scope isn’t, type into the steer composer in the goal’s drawer. A steer is picked up on the next round, and only your steer can amend the objective.
• In a channel, the goal belongs to the conversation. Anyone in the room steers or stops it by writing a normal message, such as stop, provided they can send messages there: that takes the USER role or higher, and a VIEWER can read but not send.

Once the goal has ended, the drawer’s composer says Goal has ended rather than accepting a steer, which is your confirmation that the stop took.

What does stopping a job leave behind?

Terminate and Disable leave the job and its run history in place; Delete removes both. A job is a definition (which agent, and what to ask it) plus a trigger that decides when it runs: Manual, Cron or Push. Three things follow from that:

• A manual job has no on/off switch. It runs once when it is started, so after Terminate it stays stopped until it is started again.
• Disable is a pause, not a lock. Run now fires a cron or push job as if its schedule or event had arrived, and it works even while the job is switched off.
• The run history is the record of what happened. Each run’s Steps tab shows which tools ran, in what order, with each call’s arguments and its result or error, and a run that failed keeps the transcript of everything it did before it failed. Disable a cron or push job rather than deleting it until you have read that.

To confirm the stop took, look for a run recorded as Cancelled, meaning an in-flight run was stopped, or, on a disabled cron job, the Off badge and no Next timestamp, because its schedule is frozen. If the job was running a goal, a cancelled manual run keeps its Result card, so the rounds it completed are still there to read.

What does switching Inbox off leave behind?

What was already processed stays: a disabled mailbox keeps the mail it processed, and mail a rule already labelled keeps its label after the rule is switched off. Three details matter in an incident:

• An auto-send rule can always be switched off. Switching any rule off always works, even for an auto-send rule that doesn’t meet the bar for sending automatically and can’t be switched back on until you rewrite it. Turn that kind off first: an auto-send rule is the one path where Insulin sends mail without you.
• Marketplace-event rules have no trigger row. Saving the rule is what subscribes it to the event, so its own switch is the control.
• Queued work waits for you. Drafted replies and CRM actions sit in the Pending queue, the tab Inbox opens on. A reply goes out only after you press Send and confirm it, a CRM action runs only when you click Run in chat, and Archive drops a draft without sending it.

Disconnect is a deletion, not a pause. It immediately deletes the email Insulin has stored, with its AI drafts and the labels Inbox applied, clears your writing style and resets Inbox to a never-connected state, and it cannot be undone. It is not a full erasure either: your rules and your knowledge-base selection are untouched, a minimal record of each processed message, with no content, is kept for de-duplication and audit, and your real mailbox is not touched. Because the rules survive and apply again if you reconnect, Disconnect doesn’t remove a misbehaving rule, so switch the rule off instead. What Disable and Disconnect each do to your mail covers the difference in full.

Where does an org admin’s reach end?

At other people’s jobs, and at organization channels that haven’t been shared with them. The documentation states both:

• Someone else’s jobs. Being an org admin does not give you someone else’s jobs: only a job’s owner can see it, run it, edit it or delete it. The exception is work Planner schedules in an organization channel, which belongs to the channel, and every member of the channel sees it.
• An organization channel they aren’t in. Organization admins do not automatically become channel admins. Access to an organization channel comes from explicit membership or org-wide sharing.

So a job someone else owns is theirs to terminate, disable or delete. The monthly spending limit does reach that job, because its check sits on jobs as well as on chat and agent runs, but it stops every other AI request at the same time.

When should you use the monthly spending limit?

Last, and only when AI requests need to stop across the organization and no narrower control reaches the work.

The monthly spending limit is a ceiling on what your organization may spend in a calendar month, set on Settings → Billing as one of the three billing controls that belong to your organization. Once the month’s spend reaches it, AI requests are paused for the rest of the month. Set it below what you have already spent this month and it applies straight away, though it can take up to a minute for in-flight requests to start being refused.

Once the limit is reached	What happens
AI requests from chat, agent runs and jobs, and direct model calls such as a Custom App’s own	Paused for the rest of the month. A request that hasn’t started is refused before the model is called
Automatic top-up	Stopped
Reading, listing and searching stored files	Works
Running sandboxes	Keep running
Starting, stopping or connecting to a sandbox, creating one, and uploading files	Works
Your data	Nothing is deleted

It comes last for three reasons:

• It stops everyone. The limit is on the organization’s spend, so the pause reaches every AI request its check covers, not just the work that went wrong.
• It lasts. The pause holds until the limit resets at the start of the next month, unless you raise or remove it sooner.
• Credit doesn’t lift it. Your balance is untouched, so adding credit will not resume service. Raising or removing the limit does, automatically, within about a minute.

Frequently asked questions

Does reloading the page stop an AI reply in Insulin?

No. Reloading doesn’t stop a reply. In a one-on-one chat or a personal channel, Insulin waits 30 seconds after it notices you’ve gone, then cancels the turn only if the conversation isn’t open again. Press Stop to cancel a turn immediately.

Does writing “pause” pause a goal?

No, it ends it. Writing “Stop.”, “Cancel”, “pause” or “drop it” in the conversation ends the goal’s work the same way the Cancel goal button does. To change direction without ending it, type into the goal’s steer composer; a steer is picked up on the next round.

Can an org admin see or stop another member’s job?

No. A job is private to its owner: only the owner can see it, run it, edit it or delete it, and that includes organization administrators. The exception to that privacy is work Planner schedules in an organization channel, which every member of the channel sees.

Can a disabled job still run?

Yes, by hand. Run now fires a cron or push job as if its schedule or event had arrived, and it works even while the job is switched off. Switched off, a job won’t fire on its own, and it shows an Off badge instead of Active.

Does disconnecting a mailbox get rid of a misbehaving Inbox rule?

No. Disconnect deletes the email Insulin has stored and its AI drafts, and clears your writing style, but your rules survive and apply again if you reconnect. Switch the rule off instead: every rule has its own switch, and switching a rule off always works.

How do you pause AI across a whole organization?

Set the monthly spending limit on Settings → Billing below what the organization has spent this month. It applies straight away, with up to a minute before in-flight requests are refused, and pauses AI requests for the rest of the month unless you raise or remove it.

Takeaways

• Don’t rely on leaving the page: a reloaded one-on-one chat carries on, and a goal keeps running after you close the window.
• Writing pause ends a goal just as Stop. does; steer it instead when you only want to change its direction.
• Disable is a pause, not a lock, and Delete takes the run history with it, so disable first and read the Steps before deleting.
• An org admin’s reach ends at other members’ jobs and at organization channels that haven’t been shared with them.
• Disconnect deletes stored email but keeps your rules, so a misbehaving rule has to be switched off.
• The monthly spending limit is the organization-wide last resort: blunt, in force for the rest of the month unless raised or removed, and not lifted by credit.

Stopping the work is the containment step of an AI agent incident response plan; investigating and recovering come after it. To see how Insulin runs work on a schedule or a trigger, with a switch that pauses it without deleting it, start with scheduled AI jobs and workflow automation.