| name | heat-metal |
| description | 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. |
| user-invocable | true |
Heat Metal
Make a tool or process increasingly uncomfortable to use until it is abandoned.
Overview
Heat Metal is interpreted here as a hybrid spell with a prototype execution model.
Canonical source: Heat Metal (spell)
Provider target: OpenClaw
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.
Workflow
- Identify the tool, path, or behavior you want to discourage.
- Design the friction curve: what discomfort increases over time and at what rate.
- Implement the progressive friction: latency injection, CAPTCHA escalation, cost increases, warning banners.
- Monitor adoption of the preferred alternative to confirm the friction is driving the intended migration.
- Set a sunset date: Heat Metal should eventually end in either full migration or hard deprecation.
Deliverables
- A friction curve specification: what changes, how fast, and what the escalation stages are.
- Migration metrics: how many users/systems have moved to the preferred alternative.
- A sunset timeline with hard cutoff criteria.
Guardrails
- Friction injection must be disclosed. Secretly making tools worse without explanation is a dark pattern.
- Heat Metal targets behavior, not people. Progressive friction applied to specific users as punishment crosses into harassment.
- Always provide a visible alternative. Making something painful to use without offering a better path is cruelty, not engineering.
Default Invocation
Use $heat-metal to design a progressive friction strategy that makes a deprecated tool, abusive pattern, or unwanted behavior increasingly uncomfortable until users migrate to the better alternative.
