Heat Metal

Make a tool or process increasingly uncomfortable to use until it is abandoned.

What This Skill Does

In D&D, Heat Metal makes a metal object painfully hot — the creature holding it must either endure the pain or drop it. The real-world version is deliberate friction injection: making a deprecated API progressively slower, adding escalating CAPTCHAs to suspicious traffic, increasing the cost of a bad behavior path until the actor self-selects out. Heat Metal does not break the tool. It makes continuing to use it more painful than switching to the alternative. This is the spell behind deprecation-by-discomfort, progressive rate limiting, and sunset friction curves. In this grimoire, Heat Metal is treated as a hybrid spell with a prototype delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Heat Metal (spell).

When To Use

• You want to drive migration away from a deprecated tool, API, or workflow without hard-cutting access.
• Suspicious or abusive behavior should be progressively penalized without outright blocking.
• A gradual escalation of friction is more appropriate than an immediate ban or shutdown.

Prerequisites

• No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.

Procedure