Permission Tuner

Reduce permission prompts by fixing their causes, not by piling up rules.

Trigger

Use when:

• Permission prompts interrupt flow repeatedly
• Auto mode keeps blocking routine work or falls back to prompting everything
• Starting a new project and want to configure permissions

How Prompts Happen

• Rules resolve first: deny > ask > allow. A matching ask rule prompts even in auto mode, and a PreToolUse hook returning allow cannot override it.
• In auto mode, anything no rule resolves goes to a classifier. After 3 blocks in a row or 20 in a session, auto mode pauses and prompts for everything until you approve one.
• Auto mode drops broad allow rules: Bash(*), wildcarded interpreters like Bash(node *), package-manager run commands, Agent, and Monitor.
• Hooks that exit 2 on harmless commands count as denials and push the session toward that fallback.

Workflow

Step 1: Gather data

Rules merge across scopes, so check every file that exists, not only the user file. /permissions shows the rules Claude Code actually loaded, and claude auto-mode config shows the effective autoMode (the classifier ignores autoMode in .claude/settings.local.json).

for f in ~/.claude/settings.json .claude/settings.json .claude/settings.local.json; do
  [ -f "$f" ] && jq --arg f "$f" '{file: $f, mode: .permissions.defaultMode, allow: (.permissions.allow|length), ask: (.permissions.ask|length), deny: (.permissions.deny|length), autoMode: (.autoMode != null)}' "$f"
done
claude auto-mode config
ls -t ~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl | head -20 | xargs grep -ho '"toolDenialKind":"[^"]*"' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

toolDenialKind values seen in transcripts (undocumented, may change): permission-rule (rule or hook), automode-blocked (classifier), automode-parsing-error and automode-unavailable (no verdict, not tunable), user-rejected (you said no).

Step 2: Pick the right fix