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.

3. Filter to read-only. Keep only commands that don't mutate state. Examples of read-only: ls, cat, pwd, git status, git log, git diff, git show, git branch, rg, grep, find, head, tail, wc, file, which, echo, date, gh pr view, gh pr list, gh pr diff, gh issue view, gh issue list, gh run list, gh run view, gh api (GET), bun run typecheck, bun run lint, bun run test (for tests that don't mutate), docker ps, docker logs, kubectl get, kubectl describe, ps, top, df, du, env, printenv, any MCP tool with read/get/list/search/view in its name.