Permission Check

Purpose

Surface the full permission-mode picture across every layer Claude Code honors, so the user can see at a glance why prompts are (or aren't) firing. Claude Code resolves permission mode from a 6-tier stack; a single misconfigured layer produces silent overrides that are hard to debug by eye.

The 6 layers (precedence: bottom wins)

1. VSCode user settings — ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/settings.json (macOS), %APPDATA%/Code/User/settings.json (Windows), ~/.config/Code/User/settings.json (Linux). Key: claudeCode.initialPermissionMode.
2. VSCode workspace settings — <repo>/.vscode/settings.json. Same key. Wins over user.
3. CLI user settings — ~/.claude/settings.json. Key: permissions.defaultMode.
4. CLI project settings — <repo>/.claude/settings.json. Same key. Wins over user.
5. CLI project-local settings — <repo>/.claude/settings.local.json. Same key. Wins over project.
6. In-session mode — set at session start from layers 1-5, then mutable via Shift+Tab or /permission-mode. Authoritative until session ends.

Key insight: initialPermissionMode only fires at session start. If you toggled mid-session (or the session started before a settings change), the file-level settings are correct but the runtime mode differs. That's the #1 source of "bypass isn't working" confusion.

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