Show HN: A context-aware permission guard for Claude Code

Claude Code's permission system is allow-or-deny per tool, but that doesn’t really scale. Deleting some files is fine sometimes. And git checkout is sometimes not fine. Even when you curate permissions, 200 IQ Opus can find a way around it. Maintaining a deny list is a fool's errand.

nah is a PreToolUse hook that classifies every tool call by what it actually does, using a deterministic classifier that runs in milliseconds. It maps commands to action types like filesystem_read, package_run, db_write, git_history_rewrite, and applies policies: allow, context (depends on the target), ask, or block.

Not everything can be classified, so you can optionally escalate ambiguous stuff to an LLM, but that’s not required. Anything unresolved you can approve, and configure the taxonomy so you don’t get asked again.

It works out of the box with sane defaults, no config needed. But you can customize it fully if you want to.

No dependencies, stdlib Python, MIT.

pip install nah && nah install

https://github.com/manuelschipper/nah

Show HN: A context-aware permission guard for Claude Code
github.com

Yours is so much more involved. Keen to dig into it.

“We needed something like --dangerously-skip-permissions that doesn’t nuke your untracked files, exfiltrate your keys, or install malware.”

Followed by:

“Don't use --dangerously-skip-permissions. In bypass mode, hooks fire asynchronously — commands execute before nah can block them.”

Doesn’t that mean that it’s limited to being used in “default”-mode, rather than something like “—dangerously-skip-permissions” ?

Regardless, this looks like a well thought out project, and I love the name!

--dangerously-skip-permissions makes hooks fire asynchronously, so commands execute before nah can block them (see: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/20946).

I suggest that you run nah in default mode + allow-list all tools in settings.json: Bash, Read, Glob, Grep and optionally Write and Edit / or just keep "accept edits on" mode. You get the same uninterrupted flow as --dangerously-skip-permissions but with nah as your safety net

And thanks - the name was the easy part :)