The Official Permissions and Settings Documentation

Two pages, written by the people who built this. Open them when you want to check a detail rather than take my word for it, because this area moves and a page updates faster than a lecture does.

The permissions documentation

• https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/iam

The official page for the modes and what each one allows. It is also the page that spells out what bypass permissions actually turns off, which is worth reading before you go anywhere near it. Remember that on a normal personal plan it is not even in the mode list until you go into settings and switch it on yourself, which tells you something worth keeping: the most dangerous mode in the tool is the one you have to go and ask for by hand.

The settings documentation

• https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/settings

Where every settings file lives, which one wins when two of them disagree, and how the three lists get checked. Open it alongside your own settings.local.json, the file Claude Code has been quietly writing every time you clicked Always allow, and it stops looking like something written at you and starts looking like something you can read.

This is also the reference for rule syntax when you want to write something the starter does not cover. Check it before you write a rule, because a rule you cannot name exactly either never fires or fires on something you never meant it to catch, and neither of those failures tells you it happened.

One thing worth knowing before you read either page

Ordinary settings replace each other. Permission rules do not. They merge. Every list from every level gets added together into one pile, and then the order you already know runs across that whole pile at once: deny first, then ask, then allow.

So this is not several copies of the same thing where the top one wins and the rest are ignored. It is one list, assembled from all of them at once.

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