Bonus 3. Being asked for permission on every single action is not safety, it is a broken tool. Being asked for nothing is not speed, it is a bad night. This deck is where you decide the line, deliberately, once.
You asked for something ordinary. It asked permission. You said yes. It asked again. You said yes.
By the tenth time, you stopped reading the question.
That is the real risk. A tool that asks about everything has taught you to approve everything, which is strictly worse than a tool that asks about the right things.
A file in this course's own installer had a comment at the top naming which of three permission settings it was using. The comment said one thing. The contents were a different, much stricter one.
Every new user's first experience was a permission prompt on every file the setup wrote. They concluded the tool was broken. They were right.
A label is a claim. The file says what it says, not what its comment says. Diff it.
Your rules live in a file inside your project:
my-film/
.claude/
settings.json ← thisA folder whose name starts with a dot is hidden by default. In a Finder window press Cmd Shift . to show it. Nothing is being concealed from you, it is just tidiness.
Allow. Do it, do not ask me.
Ask. Stop and check, every time.
Deny. Never, and do not offer.
{
"permissions": {
"allow": ["Read(**)", "Write(**)", "Edit(**)", "Bash(ls*)"],
"ask": ["Bash(rm *)", "Bash(git push*)", "WebFetch(**)"],
"deny": []
}
}Read(**) means reading any file. Bash(rm *) means any command starting with rm. The asterisks are "anything from here on."
You will rarely write this by hand. You need to be able to read it, and to know it exists.
Three ship with your studio, and they differ only in how much lands in allow versus ask.
| Posture | Runs freely | You are asked about |
|---|---|---|
| Careful | reading, searching, looking | writing anything, and everything below |
| Balanced | reading and writing, inside your folder | anything leaving the machine or destroying something |
| Fast | most local work | the genuinely irreversible |
Balanced is the right default for almost everyone, and it is the one people are most often accidentally not on.
Writing files is the work. It is also the most reversible thing in the entire system, because your project is in version history and yesterday is always recoverable.
Asking permission for the reversible thing while the irreversible things scroll past is the exact wrong trade, and it is the shape of most people's default.
Regardless of posture, and no matter how fast you want to go:
Ask yourself one question about each rule: if this ran wrongly while I was asleep, could I undo it by tomorrow? If no, it never goes in allow.
The easy way, in the chat:
"Change my posture to fast, and show me exactly what that changes about what you will do without asking."
Insist on the second half of that sentence. A posture change you did not read is a posture you did not choose.
This is the distinction that matters most in the whole deck.
A permission decides whether you get asked. A guard decides whether it is possible at all.
Your delete guard and secret guard fire on every posture, including fast. They are not asking your opinion. They refuse.
The posture changes how often you are asked. It never changes whether the seatbelt is fastened.
It is about interruption, not about safety.
Safety is Bonus 6, and it is built out of things that cannot be turned off by being in a hurry.
Three places, and the more specific one wins:
| Where | Covers |
|---|---|
| your user settings | everything you do, everywhere |
my-film/.claude/settings.json | this project |
settings.local.json | this project, just you, not shared |
Put anything you would not want a collaborator to inherit in the local one. It is meant to stay off the shared copy.
The lesson from the top of this deck, applied to yourself:
"Read my settings file and tell me in plain English what runs without asking, what stops and asks, and what is refused outright. Then tell me anything in the allow list that could do something I could not undo."
That last clause is the audit. Run it now, and again whenever you change posture.
Almost everyone should have at least one:
"deny": ["Read(./_originals/**)", "Write(./_originals/**)"]Your camera originals, or your masters, or anything you cannot re-shoot. Not "ask." Deny. There is no scenario where an automated pass should be writing there, so remove the possibility rather than the convenience.
Fifteen minutes, and this one genuinely improves every session afterwards.
what is denied."*
You are asked about fewer things and you read the questions again.
Giving It a Memory. Why it forgets, what to do about it, and the two-tier system that keeps a memory useful instead of just large.
Verified against Claude Code 2.1.220 · 2026-07-30.