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Yardmaster Guide

Yardmaster keeps doing things on its own: use Safe Mode

Safe Mode restarts Yardmaster with its automatic actions and integrations switched off, so nothing merges, sends or starts on its own while you look around and fix what is wrong.

Intermediate4 minutes
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When automations fire when they should not, sessions keep appearing, or the app will not open properly, Safe Mode gives you a quiet Yardmaster. Nothing merges, sends, starts or resumes on its own, and you stay in full control: you can read every session, change any setting and run a session yourself.

Restart in Safe Mode#

  1. Open Settings > Diagnostics. The Health tab opens.

  2. Scroll to the Actions card at the bottom and click Restart in Safe Mode.

  3. Click Restart in Safe Mode again to confirm.

Yardmaster closes cleanly and opens again in Safe Mode. A banner across the top reads "Safe Mode" and has a Restart Normally button.

Auto-Resume Sessions on RestartSettings, Workflow · Default: OnAutomatically restart sessions that were active when the app was closed or crashed. Running sessions receive a continue nudge. Sessions waiting for your input are restored.Open in YardmasterOpens Yardmaster. Don't have it? Download

What Safe Mode turns off#

  • Merging: PR Merge Queue auto-merge.

  • Sessions that start or resume on their own: auto-resume after a crash or restart, the restarts after a rate limit, a lost reply or a stuck turn, and session starts that an agent or a link asked for before a crash.

  • Helpers that act after a turn ends: the AI Manager, automatic session names, running summaries, and sweep and Roundhouse hand-offs.

  • Scheduled work: every Cron Job (Slack posts included), scheduled recipes, the auto-run engine, Dev Pipeline auto-advance, sweeps, alarms, digests and other schedulers. A missed run is skipped, not saved up, so nothing bursts when you leave Safe Mode.

  • Anything that sends: Setup Backup to Gmail, Gmail and email polling, agent email, text messages and Slack.

  • Integrations: Calendar, Drive, Sheets, RSS, webhooks, the OpenClaw gateway, PR checks for the Inbox, Sentry issues and Share syncing. They stay listed but do not connect.

  • Housekeeping that changes your work: worktree cleanup, re-trying interrupted worktree merges, trimming old subagent output, empty-session cleanup and automatic tool updates.

  • Outside requests: a link that asks Yardmaster to start a session puts an approval in your Inbox instead. Any other request from a tool or agent to run a recipe, message or start a session, send, merge or change your work is refused with a note that Safe Mode is on. Requests that only stop or pause work, change a setting, or point at the screen still work.

  • Switching features back on: turning on a feature such as Automations, AutoHotkey, alarms, the daily digest or an integration saves the switch, but it does not start until you leave Safe Mode.

  • Phone access: the connection that serves Yardmaster to your phone is off, which also limits your exposure while you fix things.

  • Graphics acceleration: Yardmaster uses basic graphics, so it can still open when a display or graphics problem is what broke it.

What still works#

You can open every session and its history, send messages, start sessions yourself, approve requests and change any setting. Run now on a Cron Job still runs that job once, because you asked for it. Sessions you start yourself use your plan as usual.

A few quiet jobs keep running because they protect your data and change nothing you made: the local database backup, cleanup that follows your own data retention settings, keeping you signed in, and the local control panel other tools on this computer use (with the limits above). If you set up a Backup Mirror, each local backup still refreshes its copy, so your off-computer copy stays current while you fix things.

Leave Safe Mode#

Click Restart Normally in the banner, then Restart normally to confirm. Yardmaster restarts with everything back on. Sessions you started in Safe Mode stop.

When you start Safe Mode with Restart in Safe Mode, it is sticky: it stays on through every restart, even a crash, until you click Restart Normally. A broken setup cannot quietly drop you back into the state that was misbehaving.

When Yardmaster will not open at all#

Start it in Safe Mode from outside the app. Quit Yardmaster completely first. If a copy is frozen, close it by force: on a Mac, open the Apple menu > Force Quit, pick Yardmaster and click Force Quit. On Windows, open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), pick Yardmaster and click End task.

Open Terminal and run:

Text
open -a Yardmaster --args --safe-mode

Open the folder Yardmaster is installed in: right-click the Yardmaster shortcut on your desktop and choose Open file location. (From the Start menu, Open file location opens a folder of shortcuts instead; right-click Yardmaster there and choose Open file location again.) Look for the Yardmaster: Safe Mode shortcut. If it is not there, open Command Prompt in that folder and run:

Text
Yardmaster.exe --safe-mode

If Yardmaster was already running normally, it does not open a second copy. On Windows, the running copy tells you it did not open in Safe Mode and offers Restart in Safe Mode. On a Mac, the running copy may simply come to the front; use Restart in Safe Mode in Settings > Diagnostics instead.

If the window opens but stays blank, see Yardmaster shows a blank window. To send the team the details, see Report a problem or ask for help.

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