How to make Claude Code ask before it changes your files

What the table tells you

There are six modes. The permission modes page lists them by the names you see in the left column.

For your first month, you need three of them. Manual for anything you care about. Plan before any job that touches more than a few files. Accept edits only in a folder of copies.

Press Shift and Tab to move between them. The order is auto, manual, accept edits, plan. The status line at the bottom names the mode you are in. Read it before every first task.

Don't ask and bypass never show up for daily work. Don't ask is built for scripts with nobody at the keyboard. Bypass skips every check, and the flag that starts it has the word "dangerously" in its name. The name is fair.

Modes are how often. Rules are what at all.

Picture a babysitter with a key to your house. You can say "ask me before anything except looking around." Or "just walk around and write me a plan." Those are modes.

Then there are locks. The medicine cabinet is locked. It doesn't matter what you told the babysitter. A lock is a lock.

In Claude Code, the locks are permission rules. There are three kinds. Deny means never. Ask means always ask me, in every mode. Allow means fine without asking. Deny is checked first, and the first match wins, so a deny rule beats any allow rule. The permissions page shows the full syntax.

A rule like Read(./secrets/**) in the deny list keeps Claude out of a secrets folder. Bash(rm *) in the ask list makes it stop before any delete. Type /permissions to see every rule and the file it came from.

One honest limit. A rule matches the words of a command, not what the command really does. Lock the word rm, and a differently worded command that deletes can slip past. Treat rules as strong guardrails with known gaps.

The settings file, ready to paste

Here is the personal default from the book, the same one the permission modes page shows. Ask Claude Code to open ~/.claude/settings.json, add this, keep anything already there, and show you the file before it saves:

{
  "permissions": {
    "defaultMode": "default"
  }
}

Start a new session. The status line should read "manual mode on."

Want Claude to ask before every file edit even when you are in auto or accept edits? Add an ask rule. The docs say a tool matched by an ask rule is never approved on its own, in any mode:

{
  "permissions": {
    "defaultMode": "default",
    "ask": ["Edit", "Write"]
  }
}

Then type /permissions to check that the rule loaded and which file it came from.

Careful with "Yes, and don't ask again"

When Claude asks, the prompt gives you more than yes or no. On a terminal command, the permissions page shows these choices: Yes, Yes and don't ask again for that command, Yes and switch to auto mode, and No.

Two of those quietly change what happens next.

• Don't ask again on a file edit lasts until the session ends. On a terminal command or a web address, it is saved as a rule in the project's .claude/settings.local.json and holds in future sessions too.
• Switch to auto mode moves the whole session to auto, so the next steps stop asking.

If you meant "yes, just this once," pick plain Yes. If you already clicked one of the others and regret it, open /permissions and remove the rule.

Using the VS Code extension?

The extension has its own default. The docs say it does not read a project's settings file for the starting mode. To make every new conversation start in Manual, set claudeCode.initialPermissionMode to default in your VS Code user settings. During a conversation, click the mode label at the bottom of the prompt box to switch.

The day it didn't ask

You ran your first job yesterday. It went well. Today you start a session in a different folder, type your request and lean back for the first question.

It doesn't ask. A file gets renamed, then another. Text scrolls past. By the time you sit up, it says it's done.

Nobody said yes to any of it. You forgot to press Shift and Tab, and the session started in auto. Set the default tonight and tomorrow's first session will start by asking.

Where I turn the questions off

My assistant runs scheduled jobs at night: a morning briefing, a weekly check of my notes, a weekly pulse on my brands. Nobody is there to answer a prompt, so those jobs run with prompts off.

That is only safe because each job reads my notes and writes one report. It never fixes anything. The worst a confused night run can do is write a wrong report.

The other side cost me about an hour. One project had a rule blocking recursive delete, and it stopped a setup tool from building a new site skeleton. I built it by hand and kept the rule. An hour is cheap for a folder one wrong command can't wipe.

The chapters behind this page

This is the problem Claude Code for Non-Programmers was written for. The book is independent and is not affiliated with Anthropic.

Permissions and Modes walks you through all six modes, sets Manual as your default, puts locks on a practice folder, and ends with a five-minute test that proves the locks work.

Safety and Failure adds the next layer: deny rules for secret files, and the undo buttons for when something slips through anyway.

Automation covers hooks, rules that run on their own, and how unattended jobs handle permission when nobody is there to click yes.