Fewer Permission Prompts

Look through my transcripts' MCP and bash tool calls, and based on those, make a prioritized list of patterns that I should add to my permission allowlist to reduce permission prompts. Focus on read-only commands.

The format for permissions is: Bash(foo*), Bash(foo), Bash(foo bar *), mcp__slack__slack_read_thread, etc.

Then, add these to the project .claude/settings.json under permissions.allow.

Steps

1. Locate transcripts. Session transcripts live at ~/.claude/projects/<sanitized-cwd>/*.jsonl. Each line is a JSON object. Tool calls appear as assistant messages with message.content[] entries of type: "tool_use". The name field identifies the tool (e.g. "Bash", "mcp__slack__slack_read_thread"); for Bash, input.command is the shell string.

   Scan the recent transcripts across the user's projects dir — not just the current project — so the allowlist reflects their actual usage. Cap the scan at a reasonable number of recent sessions (e.g. 50 most-recently-modified JSONL files) so this stays fast.

2. Extract tool-call frequencies.

   • For Bash calls: parse input.command, take the leading command token (handling sudo, timeout, pipes, &&, env-var prefixes). Record the command + first subcommand pair (e.g. git status, gh pr view, ls, cat).
   • For MCP calls: record the full tool name (e.g. mcp__slack__slack_read_thread).
   • Count occurrences across the scanned transcripts.