Soft-Delete Is Here: A 30-Day Safety Net for Your Agents

As of the June 17, 2026 release, that drop is gone. Deleting a Macha agent is now reversible. When you delete one, it moves to a Trash tab on the Agents page and sits there for 30 days. Restore it any time inside that window and everything comes back intact — triggers, instructions, sub-agent links, and tool configuration. After 30 days, and only then, it's permanently purged. This post walks through exactly how it behaves, the one gotcha around triggers, and when soft-delete is not the safety net you actually want.

What changed, in one line

Before June 17, deleting an agent was a hard delete — gone, permanently, immediately. Now every agent delete is a soft delete: the record is flagged and hidden, not destroyed, and a 30-day clock starts. This is the same pattern you already trust in Gmail's Trash, Notion's trash, or your OS recycle bin — and it's quietly become the standard for AI-agent platforms specifically. JotForm's AI Agents keep deleted agents restorable for 30 days; V7Labs moves deleted agents to a Trash section for 30 days and records who deleted them and when; Microsoft's Entra Agent ID treats all agent deletions as soft deletes with a 30-day recycle-bin window before automatic purge. Macha's implementation follows the same well-worn convention — a deleted_at flag plus a scheduled purge — which is exactly what you want for something this load-bearing: boring, predictable, and battle-tested.

How it works, step by step

1. Deleting an agent now tells you the truth

The delete confirmation copy got rewritten. The old "this cannot be undone" line is gone — because now it can. The new dialog makes the 30-day restore window explicit, so you know before you click that you have a way back.

That's a small copy change with an outsized effect. The whole reason hard-delete dialogs make you sweat is that the warning is accurate — there's no recovery. Once recovery exists, the warning would be a lie, so it's gone. Confirmation friction drops, because the stakes genuinely dropped.

2. The agent moves to a Trash tab — not the void

Deleted agents leave your main Agents list and reappear under a new Trash tab on the same page. Each row in Trash shows two things you actually need under pressure: how long ago the agent was trashed, and how many days remain before it's automatically purged. Next to each is a one-click Restore button.

So when someone Slacks "hey, did the billing triage agent disappear?" on a Tuesday, you don't file a support ticket and wait. You open Trash, find it, see "trashed 2 days ago, 28 days remaining," and click Restore. Done.

3. Restore brings the whole agent back — not a skeleton

This is the part that matters most, and it's where naive "undelete" features fall down. Restoring a Macha agent doesn't just resurrect the name and a blank config. It brings back, intact:

• Instructions — the full system prompt and behavior rules you tuned.
• Tool configuration — every connector and tool the agent was wired to (Zendesk, Shopify, Stripe, Notion, and the rest).
• Sub-agent links — if the agent delegated to specialist sub-agents, those relationships come back.
• Triggers — the webhook and scheduled trigger config, including secrets (more on the one caveat below).

In other words, restore is not "create a fresh agent with the old name." It's the agent you deleted, exactly as it was. That's the difference between a safety net and a participation trophy.

4. The AI sidekick respects the same flow

Macha's dashboard sidekick — the assistant you can ask to build, edit, or manage agents in plain language — now routes deletes through the same soft-delete path. Tell it "delete the abandoned-cart agent" and it doesn't hard-delete behind your back; the agent goes to Trash with the same 30-day window. There's no back-door that bypasses the safety net, which is exactly the property you want from an AI that can take destructive actions on your behalf.

The one thing to watch: triggers are paused, not auto-resumed

Here's the honest caveat, and it's deliberate. When an agent goes to Trash, its triggers are deactivated, not deleted. They stop firing immediately — a trashed agent won't keep responding to webhooks or scheduled runs, which is exactly right (you don't want a "deleted" agent still answering tickets). The webhook secrets and full trigger config are preserved, so nothing is lost.

But restore does not automatically flip those triggers back on. When you restore an agent, its triggers come back in a paused state, and you re-enable them when you're ready. This is the safe default: after a restore, you almost always want to eyeball the config — confirm the instructions are what you expect, check the connectors are still authorized — before you let it start acting on live tickets again. Auto-resuming triggers on restore would mean a recovered agent could start firing the instant it comes back, possibly mid-review. Macha makes you take the explicit step.

So the mental model is: restore = the agent is back and editable; re-enable triggers = the agent is live again. Two steps, on purpose.

When soft-delete is not the safety net you need

Reversible delete is a great default, but it solves one specific problem — accidental or premature deletion. It is not a substitute for a few other things, and it's worth being clear about that:

• It's not version control. Soft-delete protects you from deleting an agent. It does not protect you from editing one badly. If you mangle an agent's instructions and save, that's a normal edit, not a delete — Trash won't help you roll it back. For risky changes, duplicate the agent first or keep your prompt in source control.
• It's not a 30-day guarantee you can ignore. The window is generous, but it's a window. After 30 days the purge is automatic and permanent. If you trashed something important "to clean up," don't assume it'll be there next quarter.
• It's not compliance-grade retention. If you need an audit trail of exactly who changed what and when across your agents, soft-delete is a recovery convenience, not a governance system. (Some platforms log who deleted an agent; treat Macha's Trash as a recovery tool, not a forensic record.)
• It's not a reason to be careless with permanent purge. If you manually purge from Trash before the 30 days are up, that's a real hard delete. The safety net only catches you if you let it.

Used for what it's for — "I clicked the wrong button" and "turns out we needed that agent after all" — it's exactly right. Just don't ask it to be a backup system.

Why this shipped now

Macha agents have gotten substantially more expensive to rebuild over the last few releases — and that's the point. An agent today isn't a single prompt; it can carry layered sub-agents, multiple connectors, custom tools, and webhook triggers wired into your helpdesk. The more configuration an agent accumulates, the more catastrophic an accidental delete becomes. Soft-delete is the natural counterweight: as agents become real infrastructure, deleting them should behave like deleting infrastructure — recoverable, with a grace period.

It also landed alongside a credit price cut in the same June 17 release (GPT-5 dropped to 2 credits per response, GPT-5.4 to 3, with GPT-5.4 Mini staying the default at 1) — part of a broader push to make running and iterating on agents cheaper and less scary. Soft-delete fits that theme: experiment more freely, because a wrong move is no longer fatal. And to be clear on cost — restoring an agent uses no credits. It's a free safety feature, not a metered action.

FAQ

How long do I have to restore a deleted agent? 30 days from when you deleted it. The Trash tab shows the exact days remaining for each agent. After 30 days it's permanently purged and can't be recovered.

Does restoring bring back the agent's triggers and tools? Yes — instructions, tool configuration, sub-agent links, and trigger config (including webhook secrets) all come back intact. The one difference: restored triggers come back paused, and you re-enable them when you're ready to go live again.

Does soft-delete cost credits? No. Deleting, trashing, and restoring agents are free. Credits in Macha are spent on AI actions (0.5–9 credits by model, with the default GPT-5.4 Mini at 1 credit) — not on managing your agents. See the pricing page for details.

What happens if I delete an agent through the AI sidekick? The same thing as deleting it manually. The dashboard sidekick uses the soft-delete path too, so any agent it deletes goes to Trash with the same 30-day restore window — there's no hard-delete shortcut.

Can I permanently delete an agent before 30 days? Yes — purging from Trash early is a true hard delete and is not recoverable. The 30-day window is there to catch mistakes; if you intentionally purge, the safety net doesn't apply.

Is this the same as backing up my agents? No. Soft-delete protects against deletion, not bad edits or long-term retention. Treat it as an undo for the Delete button, not as version control or a backup system.

Try it

Soft-delete is live now for every Macha account — there's nothing to enable. If you've been hesitant to clean up your Agents list because delete felt too final, that hesitation is obsolete: trash freely, and restore from the Trash tab if you change your mind. New to Macha? Start a 7-day free trial, no credit card required, build a few agents on top of your existing helpdesk, and know that the Delete button now has a 30-day undo behind it. Full release notes are in the changelog.

Written by Abbas (Customer Support & AI, Macha) · Reviewed by Ankeet Guha (Co-founder & CTO) · Published 2026-06-24 · Last updated 2026-06-24.