Agent Preflight

Permissions are lazy. A macOS TCC dialog or an agent tool-approval prompt fires the first time a process actually does the thing. In an interactive session that's invisible — you click Allow and move on.

In an autonomous loop, "the first time" is 3am, with nobody there to click Allow. The loop stops. Silently. It looks exactly like "no work to do."

A preflight forces every one of those moments to happen now, in front of a human.

The front door (do this first — most people miss it)

Before clicking through dialogs one at a time, check whether your agent's settings let you grant a whole tool group at once:

Settings → Extensions → [your shell/filesystem MCP] → Tool permissions → "Always allow" on each group (Interactive, Read-only, Write/delete).

This grants the entire set up front instead of waiting for each individual tool to prompt on first use. We found this embarrassingly late, after days of dialog-clicking.

Be clear-eyed about what's in there: Kill Process, Force Terminate, Write/Modify, Move/Rename. Real teeth. That is the genuine cost of an unattended loop — grant it deliberately, on a machine and a repo where you accept it.

Every distinct TOOL prompts separately