Hacker News

points by kay_o 7 hours ago | 0 comments

For some reason claude code hates using the read/write/grep tools and defaults to complex sed, awk, grep Bash:* runs which results in always consistently ignoring auto mode due to the classifier not knowing what to do with a 10-line long bash pipe instead of a read + pre/post read and write hooks being ignored and not firing, what is up with that?

[–] awfulneutral 6 hours ago

I don't understand this either, it makes commands really hard to parse. It seems like 90% of what claude does could be going through some mcp tool that could be easily sandboxed instead of bash gibberish.

[–] kay_o 6 hours ago

If it was human approval ? Read("./file.name") then Bash("docker compose run unit-tests"), sure, I can read that fine !

As I was reading your post I got another approval request that auto-mode did not understand. It was a single Bash call !!23!! lines tall on a retina mac display with six different variables. If anything this is the cause of approval fatigue and auto mode does nothing helpful when this is every call. I also have in my claude.md and global instructions to use tool calls rather than bash grep/cat/find, which are disregarded.

[–] awfulneutral 5 hours ago

Yeah I agree, I didn't used to feel approval fatigue but lately the huge bash chains are giving it to me. I haven't even tried auto mode. I'm just sure it has some definition of "safe" that does not align with my own.

[–] kay_o 4 hours ago

I'm not sure when claude started preferring huge bash chains but auto mode tends to decline most of them and drop to a permission prompt -- getting rid of the use of auto mode -- because it refuses to handle anything chained with expansions, variables or similar items

[–] dcrazy 6 hours ago

I use a hook to deny attempts to invoke `grep /` and `find /`, even as part of a complex pipeline.

[–] awfulneutral 6 hours ago

I had claude write a hook to deny `find /`. It tested it thoroughly. Much later I learned that the hook denied `find /` but allowed everything else that existing permissions denied, like running whatever random python/bash code it wanted without asking.