Choose how much agents do on their own

Agent Permission Level decides how much a Claude agent does on its own before it stops and asks you. Pick less freedom when you want to check each step, more when you trust the work and want fewer interruptions.

Change the level#

1. 1

   Open Settings > Workflow.

2. 2

   Under Agent Permission Level, pick one of the four levels.

The change applies to the next thing an agent asks to do, in every chat that has no level of its own. You may have picked a level the first time you opened Yardmaster; this is the same choice.

What each level does#

• Read-only: the agent reads and suggests, but asks before writing any file or running any command.

• Guarded (the default): edits files inside the project on its own. Asks before running commands, changing config files, or writing outside the project.

• Autonomous: edits files and runs commands inside the project on its own. Asks only before writing outside it.

• Full trust: never asks, except about sensitive files (see below).

If your agent asks about every command, that is Guarded working as designed. Pick Autonomous to let it run commands inside the project.

When an agent does stop to ask, Approve what your agents ask for shows how to answer, and how to stop being asked about one kind of request.

Give one chat a different level#

To loosen or tighten a single chat, open its menu (the three dots above the conversation) and pick a level under Chat permissions. That chat keeps its own level; every other chat follows Settings.

What is always protected#

Whatever level you pick, an agent still asks before it touches sensitive files, such as SSH keys, cloud passwords, system files and the files your terminal runs at startup. A chat started by an email has even tighter limits: some actions are refused outright.

The one exception is Full Send, which you turn on for a single chat from the arrow next to Allow or from the chat's Chat permissions menu. After you confirm a warning, that chat stops asking about anything, sensitive files included, until you close or archive it or Yardmaster restarts. A red Full Send badge shows while it is on; click it to turn it off. Approve what your agents ask for has the steps.