Auto Wm

auto-wm — Autonomic Work Mode

Overview

Two modes, both auto-approving most tool calls via a PreToolUse hook and logging each decision to an audit log. They differ only on whether the user is around to be asked something:

• partner (default) — you're at the keyboard: available for questions, brainstorming, feedback, hints. Tool calls auto-approve; AskUserQuestion is left completely alone, same as a session with no hooks. Window defaults to 8h.
• away — you're not around. Same auto-approval, but AskUserQuestion is denied (nothing to gain from asking). Window defaults to 4h.

Three guards bound both modes, re-checked by the hooks on every event — no cron or session timer needed:

• Wall-clock expiry. No window is open-ended; anything longer than 12h is capped to 12h. An elapsed window flips itself off and normal prompts resume.
• Project scope. State is kept per project: each one records its own mode and window, and a call whose cwd is outside every armed tree is never auto-approved. Enabling AWM in one repo neither arms the machine nor disarms another repo — two sessions in two checkouts can both be covered at once, each expiring on its own clock. The banner obeys the same scope, so a project AWM is not armed in is told nothing (#296).
• Denylist. Destructive shell commands (rm -r, sudo, force-pushes, piping the network into a shell, crontab, …), network egress (WebFetch, WebSearch), and writes outside the project are never auto-approved. They fall through to the normal permission prompt and are logged as denylisted.

Partner only ever starts because you explicitly ran auto-wm (or /auto-wm) — a session where auto-wm is never invoked keeps Claude Code's normal per-tool prompts. Once started, enable/partner and away are just the two states that mode can be in; switching between them overwrites the current one.

Commands

All via python3 ~/.claude/skills/auto-wm/scripts/awm.py:

| Command | Effect | |---|---| | enable / partner [DURATION] | Switch to partner mode: auto-approve, questions untouched, expires (default 8h) | | away [DURATION] | Switch to away mode: auto-approve, questions denied, expires (default 4h). Grammar: Nh, Nm, NhMm, or a bare number = hours (4h, 90m, 1h30m, 4); anything over 12h is capped | | disable (or off, stop) | Turn AWM off for this project — normal per-tool prompts resume here; other projects keep their windows | | status | This project's mode, since when, and time remaining — plus any other project still armed | | forget [PATH] [--force] | Remove this project's entry (or PATH's) from state.json entirely. disable only flips an entry off; entries otherwise accumulate for every directory AWM was ever enabled in. Refuses a live window without --force. Takes a path because the usual case — a deleted worktree — cannot be cd'd into | | decision "" | Register a judgment call in the audit log |

Invocation

/auto-wm [away DURATION | off | status | forget [PATH] [--force] | partner DURATION] — no argument means partner (8h, default). Away mode must be asked for explicitly, since it changes how questions are handled and has a clock running.

1. Run the matching awm.py command and relay its output (partner/away both print what changed).
2. On first enable (partner or away), smoke-test that the gate hook actually fires: run any trivial command (e.g. true), then tail -2 ~/.claude/awm/decisions.jsonl — a fresh auto_approve entry proves auto-approval is live. If no entry appears, check registration with jq '.hooks.PreToolUse' ~/.claude/settings.json; if missing, merge ~/.claude/skills/auto-wm/hooks/settings-snippet.json into ~/.claude/settings.json (preserve existing keys), then tell the user hooks load on /hooks or restart.
3. In the same reply, warn once (either mode): tool calls will be auto-approved without asking — close to bypassPermissions, minus the denylist, and with an audit trail. Say which project it is scoped to and when the window expires. For away mode, also note that questions get denied outright.

Files (all user-level)

| File | Purpose | |---|---| | ~/.claude/awm/state.json | {"version": 2, "projects": {"": {"enabled": ..., "mode": ..., "enabled_at": ..., "duration": ..., "expires_at": ...}}} — one entry per project. A pre-0.74 single-project file is read as one entry and rewritten in this shape on the next change. | | ~/.claude/awm/decisions.jsonl | Audit log: mode_enabled/disabled/expired, auto_approve, question_denied, denylisted, out_of_scope, decision | | ~/.claude/skills/auto-wm/hooks/ | awm_gate.py (PreToolUse), awm_context.py (UserPromptSubmit) |

While AWM is active (behavior contract)

Partner mode:

• Ask questions, brainstorm, or check in whenever it's genuinely useful — the user is available, so there's no reason to hold back the way away mode does. Tool calls still auto-approve, so the value of asking is about judgment and direction, not permission.
• Still worth registering notable judgment calls with awm.py decision, so there's a record even for things nobody was asked about.

Away mode:

• Never ask the user anything or wait for approval; the gate denies AskUserQuestion anyway. Pick the best-judgment option and continue.
• Register every significant judgment call with awm.py decision — option chosen, alternatives, why.
• Prefer reversible choices (branch instead of main, keep backups before overwrites); log anything risky before doing it.

Gotchas

• State in the project (.claude/ in a repo, CLAUDE.md edits) — the scripts are scaffolded per project, but the state is user-level: enabled flag, window, decisions. Keep all of it in ~/.claude/awm/; a state marker committed to a repo both leaks and misleads.
• Permission allowlist ≠ AWM. Adding permissions.allow entries doesn't approve everything; only the PreToolUse hook does.
• Treating partner mode like away mode. Partner mode does not deny AskUserQuestion — don't apply away's "never ask, always log" contract when the state file says mode: partner.
• Reading a fall-through as a failure. A denylisted or out-of-scope call is not an error: the normal permission prompt reaches the user, exactly as if AWM were off. Don't retry it a different way to get around the gate — ask.
• Session cron for expiry — dies with the session. The hooks compare expires_at to wall-clock instead.
• Reading the banner as proof the gate will approve. It used to be: the banner ignored scope entirely and announced away mode in every project on the machine, including ones where every call was denied (#296). Both now read the same per-project entry, but the audit log is still the only place that records what the gate actually decided.
• Editing state.json by hand — always go through awm.py so changes land in the audit log. That includes removing a stale project: forget records a mode_forgotten event, a text editor records nothing.

Installing from ai-badger

Two things are user-level here, and one is not. Getting them mixed up is why this section used to describe an install that never happened (review F-42).

What welcome-ai-badger does: it scaffolds this skill into .ai-badger/skills/auto-wm/ like every other skill. It does not copy anything to ~/.claude/skills/, and it does not merge hooks/settings-snippet.json into ~/.claude/settings.json.

What you do once, by hand: the gate only fires if its two hooks are registered in ~/.claude/settings.json. Copy the hooks somewhere stable and merge the snippet:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/auto-wm
cp -R .ai-badger/skills/auto-wm/. ~/.claude/skills/auto-wm/
# then merge hooks/settings-snippet.json into ~/.claude/settings.json, preserving existing keys

The snippet's commands point at ~/.claude/skills/auto-wm/hooks/, so the registered hooks keep working in every repo — which is the point: the state file is machine-wide (~/.claude/awm/), but each project gets its own entry inside it, keyed by path rather than by which copy of the scripts ran.

Why the skill files are per project anyway: they are versioned with the framework, so a den-refresh updates them. Re-copy to ~/.claude/skills/auto-wm/ after an update that touches hooks/ — nothing does it for you.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: Arasz
• Source: Arasz/ai-badger
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://github.com/Arasz/ai-badger

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.