Safe Mode

What it is

What it is: A Windows-Safe-Mode-style boot mode for Omniscio. When you turn it on, Omniscio restarts and comes up with all of its automatic, background behavior switched off — nothing runs on its own — so you can look at what's going on and fix things when something feels broken. You stay in full manual control the whole time.

Where to find it

What you see

• A Safe Mode launcher. In the installed app there is a separate "Omniscio — Safe Mode" shortcut (its own shield icon) sitting in the app's install folder. Double-click it and Omniscio opens in Safe Mode. Because it's a separate launcher, it works even when the normal app is too broken to open — that's the whole point. (It's kept in the install folder rather than the Start Menu/Desktop to avoid clutter; the quickest way to reach it is to right-click your normal Omniscio shortcut → Open file location.)
• A "Restart in Safe Mode" button inside Settings → Diagnostics, for when the app is open and you want to drop into Safe Mode.
• A banner across the top while you're in Safe Mode — "⚠️ Safe Mode — automation and integrations are off. You can still view and run sessions manually." — with a Restart Normally button to leave.

How it behaves

What's OFF in Safe Mode

Everything that acts on its own:

• Automation — auto-landing code to your main branch, the master-debt auto-fixer, the dev-pipeline auto-advance, auto-spawning sessions from email/chat intake, the inbox pilot, and per-session auto-run rules.
• Scheduled sending — scheduled messages, drips, digests, send-later, and alarms.
• Every integration's background activity — Gmail, SMS/Telegram, JIRA/Linear/Mission Control, agent-email, and the Firestore share sync.
• Remote/mobile access — the Tailscale tunnel that serves Omniscio to your phone is off (this also shrinks your exposure while you're poking at a broken app).
• Self-acting watchdogs — the background helpers that restart or re-spawn sessions on their own.
• Hardware graphics acceleration — Safe Mode falls back to basic graphics, exactly like Windows Safe Mode, so the app can still open even if a display/GPU problem is what broke it.

What stays ON

• Viewing every session, all history and messages.
• Changing settings (so you can actually fix what's wrong).
• Manually opening a session, sending a message, or starting a new session yourself.
• Login/credentials, the database, the local control server (127.0.0.1) — all normal.

The net effect: the app still works, it just does nothing on its own.

• It's sticky. Once Safe Mode is on, it stays on across restarts — even if the app crashes — until you deliberately choose Restart Normally. That way a broken app can't quietly pull you back into the state that was misbehaving. Leaving is always one click away via the banner.
• It's always one app. Omniscio never runs two copies on your data at once. If the app is closed, the Safe Mode launcher opens it in Safe Mode; if it's already running and misbehaving, the launcher tells the running app to restart itself into Safe Mode. Restarts are graceful — your running sessions are cleaned up, not killed.
• New features are safe by default. Any background service added to Omniscio in the future is automatically inert in Safe Mode unless a developer explicitly marks it as essential — so Safe Mode can't slowly rot into being un-safe as the app grows.

When to use it

Reach for Safe Mode when Omniscio is misbehaving and you want a calm, do-nothing app to diagnose or fix from — runaway automation, a session storm, something that won't stop on its own, or an app that won't open normally. It's a break-glass recovery tool, not an everyday mode.

For agents

Under the hood (for agents)

• The signal that Omniscio is in Safe Mode is a small marker file (SAFE_MODE) in the user-data directory — deliberately not a normal setting, because the settings database is exactly what might be broken. Three things activate Safe Mode: the marker file, the --safe-mode launch flag (what the launcher passes), or the AMC_SAFE_MODE=1 environment variable (used by tests and power-recovery).
• Safe Mode is a boot mode: the automation/integration layer is simply never started (rather than paused mid-run), which is why it's reliable. It reuses Omniscio's startup-task registry as the on/off seam — the runner skips every task not opted in via runInSafeMode, while the fragile inline core boot (window, database, auth, IPC) is untouched.
• The read-only CLI GET /state endpoint reports safeMode: true|false.
• Full engineering detail + the test-locked invariants: .claude/memory/contracts/safe-mode-contract.md.

Related

Safe Mode switches whole areas of the product off at once; these two are the lighter, more selective versions of the same idea.

• Lite mode — the lighter mode that trims what the app loads.
• Low power mode — the mode that trades speed for battery and heat.