Agent hooks and permissions

See Agent instructions and permissions for what these do in a session.

Repo instructions

• assist advise prints the instructions a session in this repo starts with. --explain lists every section with whether it’s included and why, and --hook prints them in the form Claude Code reads at session start.

Deny rules

• assist deny add <pattern> <message> blocks commands starting with pattern, showing agents message instead. It writes to the repo’s assist.yml; --node writes to ~/.assist.yml.
• assist deny remove <pattern> removes a rule, with the same --node flag.
• assist deny list lists the rules that apply here and where each is set.

assist cli-hook deny add, remove and list are the same commands.

Permissions

• assist cli-hook check <command> prints whether a command would run without a permission prompt, and why. --tool checks against a tool other than Bash, such as PowerShell.
• assist cli-hook add <cli...> finds a CLI’s read-only subcommands, such as gh or acli jira, and adds them to assist’s list of commands that run without asking. Run it from a clone of assist, then commit the result. Discovery is cached; --no-cache runs it again.

Hooks

• assist cli-hook internal approves read-only commands and blocks denied ones. With sessions.askQuestion on, it also blocks AskUserQuestion in dashboard sessions and points the agent at assist ask-question. Called by the PreToolUse hook on shell commands, reads and AskUserQuestion.
• assist edit-hook internal blocks edits that add code comments. Called by the PreToolUse hook on file edits.
• assist codex-hook internal approves read-only commands in Codex sessions, starts them with the repo’s instructions and keeps their status on the dashboard. Called by Codex’s hooks.
• assist pi-hook internal approves read-only commands in pi sessions and blocks denied ones. Called by assist’s pi permission-gate extension.
• assist code-comment set <file> <line> <text> internal requests a single-line comment of up to 50 characters, sending a pin to your desktop notifications. See Approving a comment. Called by agents whose edit the comment gate blocked.
• assist code-comment confirm <pin> internal adds the comment the pin was issued for. Called by agents whose edit the comment gate blocked.
• assist notify internal shows a desktop notification. Called by the Notification hook.
• assist status-line internal prints Claude Code’s status line: model, branch, context use and rate limits. Called by Claude Code’s status line.
• assist prompts internal lists the tool calls you’ve been asked to approve most often. Called by /prompts.